


The Ones We Leave Behind

by backfire



Category: The Society (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Harry Bingham's Boat Shoes, Memory Alteration, Parallel Universes, Supernatural Elements, Time Shenanigans, i'm canonizing that tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:28:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 63,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24192106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backfire/pseuds/backfire
Summary: On Monday, May 10th, Allie Pressman wakes up with a fever and a raging headache. That same morning, Harry Bingham sleeps through his alarm and doesn’t wake up until noon.They both miss the bus to New Ham.
Relationships: Harry Bingham/Allie Pressman
Comments: 109
Kudos: 255





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is based off an incredible [anon prompt](https://dystopians.tumblr.com/post/618063132204679168/a-prompt-on-monday-march-18th-allie-pressman). obviously things have spiraled.
> 
> featuring: complete canon divergence after like 10 minutes of episode 1, one part case fic two parts (unintelligible muttering), white claw™️, conspiracy theorist allie pressman, and Harry Bingham Is A Flirt.

The morning of Monday, May 10th, Allie Pressman wakes up covered in sweat and with an awful pounding in her head. She tries to get out of bed but is immediately hit with a wave of vertigo and nausea so strong that she collapses back against the comforters with a long groan and closes her eyes again.

She’s too uncomfortable to fall fully asleep, instead drifting in and out of consciousness with a vague awareness that it’s way past due for her to be up and ready if she wants to make it in time to go with Cassandra to the field trip pick up point. But the energy to do so has been sapped from her muscles, instead seeming to congregate in her head and cheeks, circulating a prickly heat that spreads from her forehead flush down her face and neck.

It’s not until Cassandra comes into her room that she finds the willpower to sit up in bed, though she does so sluggishly, leaning back heavily against her bedpost.

“You’re still not up?” Cassandra asks when she pokes her head in the door. “Breakfast is ready. Are you all packed?”

“Be down in a sec,” Allie responds weakly, finally peeling the covers back all the way and getting to her feet. She sways for a moment, but manages to remain vertical this time. 

“Woah there.” Cassandra holds out a steadying hand. “You don’t look great. Are you sick?”

“No, no, I’m fine,” Allie says, waving her hand feebly. She is _not_ going to miss this trip; everyone’s been looking forward to it for weeks, herself included. 

Cassandra puts the back of her palm against Allie’s sweaty forehead. Allie swallows dryly—Cassandra’s hands are always freezing cold thanks to her condition, and they feel like ice against her skin.

“Okay, I run cold and even I can tell you’re burning up,” Cassandra says, drawing her hand back. “I don’t know if you’ll be able to go like this.”

There it is—what she’s been dreading hearing.

“No, I can still go,” Allie insists. “I just didn’t get a good night’s sleep. I’ll be fine in a couple hours.” Even as she says it she knows it’s not true, a flu-like lethargy consuming her entire body. She wants nothing more than to curl under the covers and never get up.

But this is supposed to be the trip of the year—before prom, after AP exams, ten whole days in the Great Smoky Mountains. It’s all anyone’s been talking about for the last three months. There’s not a single person in the junior and senior classes not going, and most of the teachers for their grades have taken advantage of the situation and taken time off.

Allie had been planning to use the trip to get closer to Will, maybe even tell him how she feels. Cassandra’s words on last week after the play had helped her come to that decision—it’s about time. They’ve been friends for so long, and Allie’s so ready for more.

But it’s apparently not in the stars; Cassandra brings their mom into the mix, and from then it’s all over. One phone call to her pediatrician and a digital copy of a note to stay home from school later, and Allie finds herself wrapped up in her comforter again.

She has that horrible feeling where she’s too sweaty with the blankets on but too cold with them off, and she fidgets relentlessly until Cassandra comes back into her room with a cup of tea and an apologetic look.

She sits down on the edge of Allie’s bed and looks at her through her curtain of bangs a little sadly. “I’m really sorry. I know how much you wanted to go. I wish you could come,” Cassandra says, stroking some hair away from Allie’s damp forehead.

“Ugh,” Allie groans. “You shouldn’t get so close to me. You’ll catch whatever I have and then we’ll both be stuck here.”

Cassandra laughs lightly, but she does scoot away a bit. “Listen, we don’t have to get to the green for another half an hour. I bet I could convince Mom to let you come in the car with us to drop me off. Think you’re up for that?”

“Oh my God, yes, please. Let me pretend for just a little bit that I’m not dying and I’m actually going on the trip of a lifetime,” Allie says. She doesn’t care how tired and feverish she is—she’s going.

“You’ll be able to say bye to Will, too,” Cassandra says with a knowing look in her eye.

“Ugh. Best laid plans, and all that, you know?” Allie laments, groaning.

“So you were actually going to do it, then? Tell him how you feel?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. If an opportunity came up,” Allie mumbles. It’s not like she’s shy, per se, when it comes to these matters. Cassandra’s even called her reckless a few times, coming right out and doing whatever she feels in the moment. She can recall more than one party that had ended in an unintended liplock, just because the urge had struck her at the time. But it’s _Will_ , whom she’s known since forever, not just some passing crush or random party dude.

Cassandra smiles at Allie proudly and reaches over to squeeze her hand. In that moment, Allie is struck with a strange mix of emotion. Jealousy, because Cassandra gets to go on the trip and she doesn’t—part of her wonders if people will even notice she’s missing. Of course, Cassandra’s always in the spotlight anyway, so why not now? What difference does it make if Allie’s there or not? After all, she’s the assistant stage manager. Cassandra’s the star.

On the other hand, she feels a profound love for her sister and is already mourning their lost time together, because this really is their only chance to go on a trip like this, together, with all their friends there. By the time this same trip is going to come around next year for Allie, Cassandra will be finishing up her first year at Yale. Just like that, their last hurrah together is gone, set ablaze by her spontaneous fever.

She looks away from Cassandra’s warm gaze. “I guess there’s always this summer,” she says quietly, a sort of consolation to herself.

Cassandra smiles. “That’s the spirit. Now come on, let’s go.”

Thirty minutes later finds Allie with her chin resting against the rolled-down window in the backseat of the family suburban, wistfully looking at all the parents and kids spread out across the green saying their goodbyes. She sulks; all her peers are boarding the buses while she’s sitting glumly in the car, feverish and dizzy.

“It’ll be okay, sweetie,” her mom says from the front seat while her dad grabs Cassandra’s bags from the trunk. “We’ll have fun hanging out just the three of us, okay?”

Allie closes her eyes, not responding. Great. Ten days of literally no one in town to hang out with except her parents. She doesn’t have fancy Yale friends like Cassandra does to rely on either—everyone she knows is setting foot on those buses.

“I’ll text you and we can FaceTime every day, okay?” Cassandra says, sensing Allie’s sullen mood as she comes around the side of the car, backpack slung over her shoulder.

“Okay,” Allie says, not really having the energy to wax on about it. She thinks maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all, coming here. She can’t even get out of the car because she doesn’t want to get anyone else sick. And she doesn’t see Will among the people gathered on the green, either.

Someone she does spot is Kelly Aldrich, wearing a nervous expression and loping across the green to their car.

“Hey,” she greets Cassandra, shifting on her feet nervously. Allie observes quietly—they’re not exactly friends with Kelly, even though she’s nothing but polite to them and had made a feeble sort of effort to extend them an invitation to Harry’s party after the play. “Um, you haven’t seen Harry around anywhere, have you?”

Allie frowns—she thought the two of them had broken up. She doesn’t know what happened between them, but the news of their split had been all over the school, the picture perfect prom queen and king over for good.

“No, I haven’t,” Cassandra says, looking at Kelly kind of strangely. Everyone knows they don’t get along. “Why would I have?”

“I’m just asking everybody,” Kelly answers, smiling apologetically. “It’s fine, I’m sure he’s on one of the buses already. Thanks, though.” She gives another tight, anxious smile before departing the way she came, across the green.

“Weird,” Cassandra mutters under her breath. Allie rests her chin on her crossed arms, lying on top of the rolled down window. It’s a perfect day out, the late spring breeze soothing on her skin. Cassandra gives Allie’s arm a sympathetic pat. Behind them, one of the buses honks—it’s time to go.

“I’ll send you lots of pictures, okay? And we’ll go somewhere this summer, just the two of us, or maybe with Will? Or Sam?”

It’s nice that Cassandra’s trying to make her feel better instead of act excited about the trip like Allie knows she wants to. She gives a small smile. “Yeah, okay,” she says. Cassandra gives her a final squeeze on the arm before she turns to gather her bag and hug her parents. 

Another bout of nausea hits Allie then and she rolls up the car window and closes her eyes, senses suddenly overloaded by the gathering of people all across the green, the colors, the sounds of laughing and chattering, the smell of the freshly mown grass—so she misses when Cassandra gives a final wave backwards before stepping onto a bus.

When she gets home, Allie ignores her mom offering to heat up breakfast for her and goes straight back to bed, burrowing under the covers and feeling weak and malaised, ready to close her eyes and go back to sleep for ages.

  
**  


Harry’s head is pounding when he wakes up.

His mouth is dry and sour-tasting and he feels like death warmed over, immediately regretting the second he opens his eyes. The natural light in his room is blinding, and he can see spots bloom against the inside of his eyelids when he squeezes them shut again too quickly. It had definitely been a mistake drinking as much as he had last night. But hindsight is 20/20, or whatever. He wishes he were still asleep, but he’s so immediately uncomfortable upon waking that he knows it’s not happening again. And God, he wishes it weren’t so bright.

Wait. That registers with Harry, something clicking into place—the light...it’s normally not this bright in his room in the morning, the western-facing windows usually prone to weaker, more grayish light earlier in the day. Which means—

He snaps his eyes open and he shoots upright in bed, ignoring how it makes his head swim. What time is it? What _fucking_ time is it? He searches desperately for his phone within the bed sheets and finds it, somehow, lodged inside the pillowcase. Dead, just a useless, unresponsive brick by now. Harry curses, plugging it into its charger quickly and then sliding out of bed to find his laptop, the only other device in here that could give him the time.

It’s gathering dust on his desk from how little he uses it, but it powers on easily enough, lighting up from black and then taking him to the login page where the time, tiny and in the upper lefthand corner of the page, reads 12:04pm. 

Fuck. _Fuck._

He was supposed to have been at the green hours ago for the trip, _shit_. Scrambling over to the dresser, he quickly throws on whatever clean clothes he pulls out and splashes cold water on his face in the bathroom before stumbling out again to check on his phone. It’s alive now, with 3% battery and charging. Notifications are starting to roll in—two missed calls from Kelly, and a couple messages. No one else.

_Kelly Aldrich: where are you?_

_Kelly Aldrich: hello?_

_Kelly Aldrich: I get that you’re still upset, but you could have at least told me you weren’t coming._

Shit. That last one had been sent hours ago, which means the buses are probably long gone now. He throws the phone onto his bed in frustration, leaving it on its cable to charge before snatching it up again. Part of him wants to get in one of the cars and speed over to the green, really make sure that everyone’s all gone, but he knows it’s no use. They were supposed to leave at 9:30 on the dot. There’s no way they waited around over two hours for him. He’s shit out of luck.

Head still pounding, he wakes his phone and presses dial for Karen Bingham. It rings for a long time; he’s expecting it to go to voicemail when, on the last ring, she finally picks up.

“Hello?”

“You couldn’t have woken me?” Harry says by way of greeting, his tone accusatory.

“Excuse me?”

“This morning. I was supposed to go on the trip?”

Over the phone there’s a sigh, coming out static and fuzzy in Harry’s ear. “Harry,” she says, an unimpressed edge to her voice that she so often has these days. “You’re eighteen years old. I can’t be looking after you like a child all the time.”

“Okay, well what about Lucy? She woke up in time.”

“She, unlike you, knows how to set her own alarm. And she tried, by the way. You didn’t answer the door and she had to go to school.”

Harry breathes out harshly. He knows he’s just directing his anger at her, which is easy to do even when the fault is his own. He’s just so— _pissed,_ damn it, he’d been looking forward to the trip for ages. Well, maybe not so much recently. He was supposed to host bonfire parties with the stash of booze someone would have been sure to have brought, have all these grand adventures with Kelly, sneak off with her at night to fool around in the woods. Half of that plan had gone up in smoke the moment Kelly’d dumped up with him, though.

“Well, can’t you do something about it? You’re the city attorney, for fuck’s sake,” he says petulantly, a last ditch attempt.

“What do you want me to do? Call the bus and make them turn around just for you?” Karen says. “Listen, I don’t have time to talk about this with you right now. I have actual problems to take care of. If you overslept and missed your trip, that’s on you.”

She hangs up on him after that. Harry stares at his phone for just a second in disbelief before he throws it angrily back onto the mattress. It bounces off the covers and lands with a loud clatter on the floor, still attached to the charging wire.

So fucking unfair. Whatever— _whatever_ , he tells himself, it probably would have sucked anyway. There were lots of people going that he didn’t like. Cassandra, for one. That guy Will LeClaire who was always fucking staring at Kelly. Others he can’t even put a name to right now.

The self-platitudes don’t make him feel any better, so he goes over to the window and properly draws the blinds shut all the way so the light in his room is once again dim and faded before climbing back into bed and draping an arm over his eyes. And then he just lays there stewing, too uncomfortable and keyed up to fall back asleep.

The next day, Harry doesn’t bother going to school.

There’s no point, everyone is fucking gone. So he lounges by the pool instead, the weather just on the side of warm enough for him to enjoy the sunlight and dip his feet into the water. His mother obviously doesn’t care because she hardly spares him a glance when she breezes past him and into her car, gone for another day of work. 

The smell is also gone, he’s noticed, so he just assumes that whatever strings his mom and the rest of the people at city hall pulled have somehow worked.

No one’s bothered texting him, which stings a little. No one’s updated their Instagram stories either, beyond the slew of random clips and selfies obviously taken from the bus that are now expired. That part’s a little weird, but Harry shrugs it off and languishes in the May sunlight, part of him strangely comforted by the idea that he’ll get ten whole days of just...peace and quiet. No school. No exams, no college prep. No arguments with Kelly—he’ll worry about that when everyone gets back. Hell, maybe he’ll take one of the cars and go to the beach house for the next week. His mother obviously doesn’t give a shit. But then he feels guilty about the idea of leaving Lucy all alone with her, so he drops it.

The next day is much of the same, but Harry decides to take a trip into town in the afternoon for some snacks at the drugstore, maybe see if he can’t talk the burnout cashier into selling him some overpriced weed.

When he gets there and is browsing through the junk food aisles, though, he spots a head of curly, blonde hair at the pharmacy counter. 

Allie Pressman—he’s seen her around school plenty, though they’ve never spoken all that much outside of a few words here and there during play rehearsals. These days, he just thinks of her as Cassandra’s sister, really. But the sheer surprise of seeing her here, when he thought everyone his age had gone on the trip, is enough to make him call out to her when she turns around, paper pharmacy bag in hand.

“Allie?”

She starts slightly, looking up from where she’d been frowning pretty hard at something on her phone. “Harry? What are you doing here, you’re not on the trip?”

“Could ask you the same thing,” he says, crossing his arms and leaning back against one of the aisles.

“I got sick,” she says, holding up the paper pharmacy bag. “Fever and everything.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. Some kind of bug, I guess. Picking up some medicine, even though I’m mostly better now.” She does look a little paler than usual, now that she’s mentioned it.

“Better excuse than mine, I guess. Overslept,” he says, shrugging. 

Allie snorts and—and it’s cute. 

Huh. 

Truth be told, he’s always thought she was cute—especially when they were children. Wow, he hasn’t thought about that in ages. He guesses he’d kind of just forgotten about it until now, too preoccupied with Kelly and trying to win student body president and college and his dad and everything else.

“You must have been pretty pissed when you woke up,” Allie says. “I know I was, and it wasn’t even my own fault.”

“Yeah,” Harry chuckles, “yeah. I was, but...it’s actually been kinda nice, you know? Peace and quiet, for a change.”

Allie smiles, brushing her hair back behind her ear. She looks pretty when she does that, he can’t help but notice. “That’s a nice way of looking at it.”

“I guess. Well, hey, feel better,” he says. She nods and then tucks her medicine inside her bag, turning to leave.

He doesn’t know what makes him do it, but before she can go he calls out to her again. Maybe it’s because she’s a pretty girl and he can’t help himself around those, maybe because he’s so pleasantly surprised to see her, maybe it’s because it just feels right. 

“Hey, wait,” he says. “Do you wanna—I don’t know, exchange numbers or something? We’re the only ones here while everyone else is outta dodge for the next week and a half, might be a good idea, you know?” He tilts his head just so and gives her a little smile, the one he knows girls find charming.

Allie raises her eyebrows skeptically, though the edges of her lips lift ever so slightly. She regards him for a moment, sizing him up before saying, “You can’t be an asshole to my sister and then nice to me. It doesn’t work that way.”

Harry looks around, pretending to scan the store. “I don’t see your sister here, do you? Seems like it’s just us.”

She presses her lips together like she’s suppressing a smile and rolls her eyes a bit before fishing her phone out of her back pocket, unlocking the screen, and handing it to him. Harry gives her a winning smile and inputs his number, saving his contact information as just “Bingham.” Then he opens a new message and sends himself a text, the waving hand emoji, before giving her phone back to her.

Before he does, though, he manages to catch just a glimpse of her message history—the latest one is from Cassandra yesterday, just a text that says “I’m sorry.” 

Interesting, though not his business, so he doesn’t dwell on it when Allie gives him a two-fingered salute and makes her way to the exit of the store.

“See you around, Bingham,” she calls to him before going through the door. He shakes his head and gives a small, amused laugh.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising for him to spontaneously flirt with the likes of Allie Pressman. What does surprise him, however, is that she’d flirted back.

  
**  


Okay. So she has Harry Bingham’s number.

Allie’s not really sure what to make of that, so she ignores her phone for the whole next day, letting the single little waving emoji burn a hole in her inbox while she sits on the couch and watches old episodes of _Veep_ on her parent’s HBO account. She hadn’t missed the way he’d looked at her, either, half amused, half checking her out, that easy grin sliding across his face in a way that had told her he _knew_ he looked good doing it. But there’s not much she can say to that because...well, he did look good. And she’d given him her number in the end, hadn’t she?

Honestly, though, she’s more concerned with how his message from yesterday is still sitting at the very top of her inbox.

She hasn’t heard from Cassandra or Will or Sam or anyone else in days. The last time she’d tried to send her sister a quick text checking in, the message had been pending for several minutes before finally turning green with a red “not delivered” message underneath it.

“Well, they’re in the mountains, right? Reception’s never reliable up there,” her dad had said, shrugging it off when she’d brought it up over dinner yesterday.

It makes sense, she guesses, so she doesn’t kick up a fuss about it. It’s only been three days, but she misses Cassandra. She misses Will. The last of the bug is leaving her system, and she can’t pretend that she doesn’t wish she were there with them, huddled around a campfire making s'mores and taking Instagram-worthy hiking pictures with amazing views.

Even if they did have reception, though, Allie doesn’t know if she’d tell Cassandra about getting Harry’s number. That’s something she’d rather keep to herself, something she can have all on her own—it’s a tiny bit illicit, a tiny bit exciting. Plus it’s not like she’s really planning on texting him, nor has he texted her.

Frowning at her phone, she skips past the message from Harry and opens her history with Cassandra. The last thing she’d received was a message that said _”I’m sorry,”_ preceded by a sneakily taken, slightly blurry photo of Kelly and Will sitting next to each other on the bus, heads tilted close together, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder.

She can’t pretend that it doesn’t hurt. She’s always sort of known that Will had a thing for Kelly, but she never thought anything would come of it since Harry and Kelly were together, and that maybe one day he’d open his eyes and see that Allie had been right there all along, and…God, it’s literally a Taylor Swift song now that she thinks about it.

Well. Whatever. There’s nothing she can do about it until they all get back from the trip. Even then, she doesn’t know what she’ll do—she’s not the type of person to kick up a fuss about it to his face. It just sucks, having to find out this way.

When the next day comes and she still can’t reach Cassandra or anyone else, and her parents still shrug it off, insisting that they’re sure she’s fine, Allie can’t take it anymore.

She knows they’re probably okay and having the time of their lives, but there’s an anxiety gnawing away at the center of her chest. She’s never gone this long without talking to Cassandra before. Even when she’d gone away for Yale weekend and to all those volunteer service trips over the years, she and Allie had always texted at least once a day.

Just before noon, she pulls up her messages. She hesitates for just a moment, worrying at her lower lip, before deciding—fuck it. She's curious enough, and the anxiety is getting to her. She clicks on Harry's name and types out a message to him.

_Pressman: Hey, have you heard from anyone on the trip?_

The reply is instantaneous.

_Bingham: Nope. You?_

Huh. Okay, well, there goes the part of her that had some hope that maybe it's just a fluke. Harry's a popular guy, after all, it seems perfectly reasonable that people would have messaged him. Especially since he missed the bus so suddenly, without any warning. But it does fit into the whole no reception idea, which of course would apply to everyone on the trip, not just Cassandra and Will—so that's what she tells herself. It's all fine. This is normal.

But the uneasy feeling is still burbling around inside her gut, and—well. That's not all, really.

She’ll be in her room browsing through summer to-do lists on Pinterest when she hears the familiar sound of plates and silverware in the kitchen.

“Allie?” her dad says with surprise in his voice when she appears in the threshold of the kitchen, where both Jim and Amanda are already seated and halfway through their meal. “We didn’t know you were home, honey,” he says around his food while her mom bustles to fix her a plate from scraps they’d already put into the refrigerator.

Or she’ll be in the living room watching TV on the couch when her mom comes through the garage entrance, arms laden with groceries. Allie pokes her head up over the couch and asks if she needs any help and Amanda startles so badly that she drops half the bags.

“Allie! You scared me, what are you doing home?”

Allie just gives her a confused look and then climbs off the couch to help with the groceries.

In fact, the both of them hardly seemed to realize she was around the past few days, always surprised (though never displeased) to see her around the house, as if they'd expected her to be gone as well.

She's not sick anymore and was technically supposed to have gone back to school, but she just...didn't. And neither of her parents had said anything.

Allie can't explain it, but something feels off. And the only other person in town who might be going through something remotely similar is Harry.

Before she can think better of it, Allie presses the 'call' icon at the top of the message box in lieu of texting her response. It rings once, twice, three times before he picks up.

"...Allie?" He sounds puzzled, and his voice is also deeper than it usually is, gravelly like maybe he's just recently woken up, even though it's nearly the afternoon now. She tries to ignore how she immediately notices that just from the way he says her name.

"Hey," she says, and—was this a mistake, calling him? For some reason, she just...really didn't want to have to type it out. She doesn’t know why she thought this would be easier, though. "No, I haven't heard from anyone."

"What?" he asks, like he's forgotten about their text conversation, before it clicks with him. "Oh. Okay?"

"Listen—do you want...are you free right now? Or in a bit?"

"I...yeah," he says, seeming to liven up. "Yeah, sure. I mean, not like we're going to school, right?" His voice slides into something smoother, more purposeful. "Why, you have something in mind?"

She holds the phone away from her face for a second and exhales through her nose. "Do you wanna grab a coffee or something?"

"...You asking me?”

“Is that a yes or a no, Bingham?”

He laughs a little. “Love to.”

"Okay. I'll text you the details."

"You want me to pick you up?" He sounds smug.

Allie rolls her eyes. "I'll text you the details," she repeats. On the other end, Harry chuckles.

"Fine. See you in a bit."

"Yeah. And Harry, listen—" She wants to nip this in the bud before he gets any ideas, which she knows he already has. "—this isn't. It's not—there's just something I want to talk to you about. That's it. Okay?"

"Sure. Whatever you say, Pressman," he says easily, and God, she can _hear_ his smirk through the phone.

Half an hour later, she leaves her house. It's been empty since this morning, both her parents having left in the morning without saying a word to her. Both their cars are gone as well, but that's okay with her. She still only has her provisional license, but she hates driving anyway, too jittery and nervous behind the wheel. _Be confident, trust yourself,_ her dad always told her when he'd given her lessons before her exam, but it was hard. Plus she likes the walk and the cafe isn't far from her place, which is why she'd chosen it.

Harry's already there when she arrives, setting down two cups of coffee at one of the round center tables and wearing a blue button-down shirt that she thinks suits him a little too well.

"Wasn't sure how you took it," he says by way of greeting when she sits down. "I can add milk or sugar or whatever you want." He's being polite, which is kind of nice—she's never seen this side of him before, always the arrogant jerk trying to go head to head with Cassandra, with Allie just watching from the wings.

"I'm more of a tea drinker actually," she says, circling her hands around the cup and letting the warmth seep into her palms. He opens his mouth, probably to offer to exchange it for her, but she quickly adds, "But this is fine, just fine." She takes a sip for good measure. It's not that she dislikes coffee; she'll just be extremely jittery and keyed up for the rest of the day, that's all.

"I'm so sorry, I’ll remember that from now on," he says, and she can already see him filing away that information for the future. This is how he does it with all the girls, huh? She has to admit, she can see why it's effective.

She shakes her head and mutters that it's fine, taking another drink perhaps just to prove to him that it really is.

"So?" he asks, his voice light and lilting. "What's up?"

Allie bites the corner of her lip, thinking, before pulling out her phone and opening her messages with Cassandra. This isn't the main reason she'd called him to meet, but...well, seeing him had reminded her for some reason, and she figures that he kind of deserves to know too. If only to prepare for what may come once everyone returns.

She turns the phone around so it's facing him. He takes the opportunity to touch her wrist to get a better angle, pulling the phone towards him. The pad of his thumb is warm, pressing against her inner wrist so surely that it makes her marvel, for a split second, how someone could have such subtle confidence. 

And then he drops it just as quickly when he sees the picture of Kelly and Will together on the bus, his expression doing a quick turn from mild, amused interest to something more serious. He looks down at his lap, his brow furrowed and his mouth set in a way that tells her he's been upset by the picture, just like she was.

And then he breathes in through his nose and lifts his head to look at her, fake nonchalance plastered on.

"I don't care," he mutters, shaking his head slightly. "You?"

"No," Allie shrugs. She knows he can hear the lie in her voice just as well as she can in his. And in that moment, there's a brief kinship between the two of them across that table, a second of understanding—she can see right through him. And she's sure that he can see through her just as well.

Then Harry tenses his jaw. "Is this what you wanted to talk to me about?" His easy going mood is gone, his posture now tenser as he regards her.

"Actually, no," she tells him, taking her phone back. "I just thought you should know."

"It's none of my business," he says, playing it cool. But she knows he's stinging. "We're not together anymore," he adds, unnecessarily.

"I'm aware," Allie says. Her voice accidentally comes off too clipped, and she feels kind of bad when he raises an eyebrow. Can't be fun, being the subject of the high school gossip mill. "Anyway, no, there's something else." She's regretting bringing up the Will and Kelly thing now as a lead up to the real topic, because things all of a sudden feel more somber. But maybe that'll help, make him take it more seriously, because all she really wants is someone to tell her she's not going crazy. She takes a deep breath.

"Okay, so we both haven't heard from anyone since they left for the trip, right?" 

Harry nods, and she continues. "Well, I did hear from Cassandra, just a little. She was texting me on the bus, but then suddenly stopped right after she sent me that," she nods her head towards her phone on the table, "and I haven't heard from her since. Or anyone else, at all. No social media posts anywhere, either. Twitter, Instagram. Weird, right?"

"Yeah," Harry says slowly. "But I mean, they're in the mountains—gotta be that there's no reception, right?"

"Yeah, that's what my dad said. And any messages I try to send to anyone are undeliverable. They don't go through."

"Have you tried calling?"

"Yeah, straight to voicemail."

"So there's no reception, then," Harry replies. But he doesn't say it like it's the obvious explanation, like _duh,_ and like she's a fool for not having thought of it. Kind of like how her dad had been, dismissive and slightly patronizing. No, he says it like—like he's trying to convince himself.

"I know that's probably the most likely explanation, but...part of me just can't help but to think that something's wrong," Allie finally admits. It feels strange to say out loud; part of her is kind of afraid, like giving the words a tangible, audible quality will manifest them into existence. "Like, I can't reach a single person."

"So what do you think happened to them, then? What else could make all their phones suddenly stop working?"

"I don't know. I don’t have any theories or proof. It's a feeling more than anything, you know?"

Harry looks just as uneasy as she feels, which speaks volumes to her. "No one other than Kelly was texting me before they left, and she was just asking where I was before the buses were even gone, so I guess you'd have a better grasp than I would," he says. She raises her eyebrows, surprised that he'd admit something like that so openly to her.

"That's not all," she continues, glancing around. "Something seems off here, too. My parents have been acting all weird the past couple days. What about yours?"

Harry clears his throat, looking uncomfortable, and Allie immediately regrets asking—his dad, oh shit, how could she have forgotten? She feels like an asshole. "Weird how?" he asks, deflecting.

She hesitates before answering. "Like—I don't know. Kind of like...they forget about me if I'm not in the room as them, if that makes sense," she says, feeling stupid for making a big deal out of it.

"Ah," Harry says lightly. "Well. My mom acts like that too, but that's been going on for months, now."

Now she feels like an idiot and an insensitive asshole. Obviously she's trying to see something that's not there, trying to project her own experiences onto Harry when they're definitely not universal.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs, and he shrugs like it's no big deal, even though he's leaning backwards in his chair now, arms crossed over his chest, posture so much more closed off compared to how it had been when they first sat down. "I guess I just wanted someone to tell me I wasn't going crazy."

"Hold on," he says suddenly, leaning forward again. "I don't think you're crazy."

"...You don't?"

"No," he shakes his head. "No, I...feel it too. Like something is off, but I can't explain what. I just don't have the same evidence as you do to back it up, if that's what you wanna call it. I've been trying to ignore it, I thought I was just bitter about missing the trip."

"Maybe that's what's happening to both of us," Allie suggests, her heart picking up. "You know, folie à deux. Shared psychosis."

"Maybe." But their eyes meet, and she can tell that they both know it's not that.

"So...what do we do?"

At that, Harry leans back in his chair again and shrugs. "Not much we can do, right? We don't have any proof of anything. And all this would be stress over nothing if Cassandra called you tomorrow, wouldn't it?"

He's right, and she knows it. It's only been three days, after all. Plus, what can they do? There's nothing to be said other than the fact that something is off—and she can't even pinpoint what exactly that something is. Not exactly ironclad and actionable.

"C'mon," he says, getting up from his chair and tilting his head towards the door. She hasn't even finished her coffee, but he can probably tell that she hadn't wanted it in the first place, despite her attempts to prove him otherwise. It’s barely been touched and long since gone cold. "Let me drive you home. I know you walked here." The smooth voice is back, as is the glimmer in his eye. It's almost a relief, a signal that things are back to normal, that their time together doesn't have to end on the note of the strange conversation.

She lets him open the passenger side door for her and watches the curve of his wrist over the sleek leather steering wheel as he drives through town. Somehow, he already knows where she lives, though she doesn't ask how, not really in the mood to talk about whatever Cassandra-related reason that might be.

"We should do this again," he says casually when he's pulled up her driveway and she's about to get out. It's so exactly the kind of noncommittal, lukewarm response you give at the end of a bland date that Allie laughs incongruously, the sound surprising even as it comes out of her mouth.

"Yeah, okay," she agrees, amused. He looks at her slightly puzzled, slightly pleased. "I'll let you know if things get even weirder, I guess. How's that sound?"

"Sounds good to me," Harry says, doing the charming head tilt again. Allie gives him a look and then gets out of the car. He doesn't pull out of the drive until she's fully through the front door, even though it's the middle of the day, and she tries not to find this bare minimum of basic etiquette endearing.

  
**  


Harry turns Allie's words over in his mind for the rest of the day, and the day after that, too.

She's right: something definitely feels off. He hadn't thought to pinpoint it to the root like she’s done, but he tries sending several texts to Kelly, Jason, Clark. Even calls them a few times. No dice. He refreshes Instagram like mad, but no one from their class is around.

At home, things are mostly the same. His mom comes home each night and pours herself a glass of wine and secretly pops an Ativan or two and retires to her room. Then Lucy's carpool drops her off from whatever activity she's booked for that day—it seems like she does everything under the sun: ballet, soccer, painting, fencing. The moment she gets home and sees Harry lounging on the couch thumbing through his old copy of _King Lear,_ she launches herself into his arms. He picks her up and spins her around and she shrieks, still as overjoyed with it as she'd been when she was a toddler, and then he asks her about her day and what she had for dinner, invariably at one of her multitude of friends' houses; the girl's more popular than he is or ever will be.

It pisses him off to no end, how Lucy gets pawned off to other people's parents because Karen doesn't want to deal with her. But she gets especially prickly whenever Harry brings it up and has threatened to take away his cars and kick him out of the house for questioning the way she raises her children, the threat looming and real now that he's eighteen.

Plus, he's sure Lucy's not a burden; she's surprisingly well-adjusted and very polite for a second child who'd obviously been his parents’ last ditch attempt at saving their marriage.

No point in pretending otherwise. It doesn't make him love his sister any less.

"How come you're not going to school?" Lucy asks him.

"I'm taking a vacation," Harry answers, pushing a finger against her nose. She giggles. "All my friends are on the field trip and so no one’s at school until they get back."

"Field trip?"

"Yeah, Lu, remember? The one I was supposed to go on? To the mountains."

Lucy shakes her head. "You were gonna leave me?"

Harry pinches her cheek and she bats his hand away, blinking at him. "I would have come back, don't worry."

All of a sudden she looks sad, her brunette curls falling down around her face as she tilts her chin down towards her chest. "Okay," she says, quiet, uncharacteristic. There's usually nothing quiet about Lucy Bingham, the human firecracker.

"Aw, don't be like that," Harry says, scooping her up bridal style in his arms. She smiles then, burying her face into his chest. "You know I'm leaving for college soon, right Lu?"

"No," she says into his shirt, voice muffled by the fabric. "You can’t go. You can’t leave this place.”

Then she pushes her way out of his arms stalks away, upstairs to her room. 

So that's weird. But the weirdest part for Harry is when he wakes up on Saturday and finds that there’s no fiery, brunette ball of energy jumping on his bed to try to get him up, as is custom on a weekend morning.

Normally Lucy bursts into the room and begs Harry to drive her to soccer practice instead of letting one of her teammates' moms pick her up, and more often than not he obliges, unless he's severely hungover or Kelly's stayed the night. He acts like he's annoyed by it, but the truth is he has an incredibly hard time saying no to anything Lucy asks (and it's sort of fun pretending not to notice all the young moms who check him out whenever he pulls up in the Maserati, but that's a different story).

It's nearly afternoon when he wakes up from his phone buzzing. That's been an issue with him more and more these days; Harry thinks that if he let himself, he'd never get out of bed and sleep all day long.

The only person he can think of with cause and ability to text him is Allie, which for some reason gets him alert very fast. He snatches his phone up from the bedside table, but it's not her—it's some girl he met in Bridgeport over winter break letting him know that she's coming back to Connecticut from school this weekend if he wants to meet up.

Harry exhales and swipes out of the message, having no intention to send a response.

When he goes downstairs, his mom is in the study and doesn't bother looking up from her paperwork as he passes by the door. Lucy's in the living room, already back from soccer practice. When she spots Harry, she looks at him for a split second like she's bewildered, and then is clambering off of the leather cushion to plaster herself against him.

"I didn't know you were home," she says, tugging at the hem of his shirt while he makes himself a bowl of cereal. "I thought you were gone."

"Where would I have gone, silly?" He tousles her hair playfully and then obligingly pours her a bowl when he spots her eyeing his.

"Away," Lucy mumbles. Harry shoots her an inquisitive look that she doesn't respond to, seeming to forget all about it as soon as he pours the milk for her Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

There it is again—the world suddenly seems off. He can't pinpoint exactly what it is, but here in his kitchen, it's like he's outside of his own body, watching himself stand there while Lucy eats her cereal with the same single-minded devotion she pays anything that's right in front of her. Harry swallows, feeling distinctly strange as he does so.

He leaves his sister then, still feeling like a stranger in his body, to head over to the study off the secondary staircase. He and his mother haven't spoken since their phone call the afternoon the buses left. She doesn’t pause in her work as Harry appears in the study doorway, going through sheafs of legal size paper in a stack of manila folders. She's always working—that's something Harry's picked up on over the years.

"Did you bring Lucy to practice this morning?" he asks when he gets sick of the sound of shuffling papers.

"Had an appointment. Cathy Visser came by to get her," Karen says, scanning over a thick packet stapled together. "We didn't know you were home."

"Where the fuck else would I have been?" Harry's irritated. He doesn't mean to swear, but it just slips out. Karen just purses her lips, not voicing her disapproval. He's not sure why he's so pissed at her, really. It's not like she'd been wrong on the phone about not being able to help him. Maybe it's just more of a default state these days than anything else. The last time he can remember her showing any modicum of affection was after his father's service, when she reached up and stroked the side of his face, her thumb rubbing just under his ear, the way she used to do when he was just a boy.

"Hey, you guys ended up sorting out the smell, though, right? Whatever you did, it worked," he comments, trying to change the topic and make an attempt at having a normal conversation with her, spurred on by the memory of her fleeting touch.

Karen finally looks at him then, flicking her eyes up sharply from behind her reading glasses. She looks puzzled, almost angrily so. "What smell?" she asks, setting her pen down. "What are you talking about?"

All at once, the uneasy feeling is back—only this time it comes tenfold, the world around him tilting and going too bright. Harry clenches his jaw, trying not to let it show.

"Nothing," he says under his breath. "Nevermind."

Karen's shoulders relax a bit and her expression smooths; she goes back to work. Harry turns away, bounds up the stairs to his room. This isn't good, he hates it so much, but the _wrongness_ of everything sends all his senses into overdrive—it's a little twisted how familiar he's become with getting these inopportune panic attacks.

Kelly used to help with them, especially those first weeks after his dad's death. She wouldn't say a word, just rubbing circles on his back. Harry could tell that she didn't know how to deal with it all, and he’d felt a little guilty for putting her through it, which had just made him feel doubly pathetic and not in control.

But Kelly's not here now. No, she’s busy with _Will,_ apparently. What truly upsets him more than anything else about that whole thing, though, is how little he actually cares. Selfishly, he’s mostly angry with how much time had he wasted trying to convince himself he was in love with her.

All he can do now is shut his bedroom door behind himself and trek, gasping for air, over to his ensuite where he finally collapses against the sink, both hands braced on either side of the porcelain, trying to force his breathing to become normal again. What was it that the therapist had told him, before he stopped going? Inhale through the nose, hold for three counts, then out through the mouth.

It’s slow going, but it works after a little while. Harry can feel the oxygen returning to his brain, his heart slowing in his chest. He turns the faucet on and splashes some cold water against his eyes, which helps, the feeling cooling and grounding. He presses the pads of his fingers a little deeper than necessary into his sockets until he sees spots form behind the darkness of his eyelids.

When he looks at himself in the mirror, it feels unreal. As in—he, Harry, feels real and solid and present, at last. But everything else doesn't. The porcelain sink edges warming against his palms, the stone tile floor under his bare feet. Even the mirror itself. Like they're all stage props, put together for this specific moment in time before being gathered away and carted off to be auctioned or thrown out or repurposed into different scenes for different actors.

Harry's not sure what exactly is going on, why he feels like this, why the world seems just barely on the side of _wrong_. All he knows is that his skin is crawling and that he has to get out of here. Out of the bathroom, out of his house, out of this town—maybe things will start to feel right once all those things are disappearing in his rearview mirror.

As soon as he stumbles out of the bathroom, Harry fishes his phone out of his pocket and finds his text thread with Allie, sitting right below the message from the random Bridgeport girl. He'd meant to text her—Allie, that is, he really did. He was fully going to, probably with some type of flirty message just to see if she'd either ignore him or respond in kind with a witty rejoinder. Both equally possible options.

The message he sends her now is nowhere near that.

_Bingham: So things are getting even weirder._

She responds quickly.

_Pressman: How so?_

_Bingham: Idk how to explain it._

This time, he's the one who calls her, and he doesn’t leave any time between when he makes the decision to do so and when he presses the ‘call’ button to question it. She picks up on the very first ring.

"Harry?"

"Hey," he says, suddenly feeling breathless. "How would you feel about getting out of town for a few days?"

She's silent for a moment. "You planning a trip?"

"A weekend jaunt to the coast."

He doesn't mean for it to come across as flirty, even though it sort of does. He's half serious, and he thinks she can tell. That's another thing he'd decided fairly quickly—one, he needs to leave town. And two, he doesn't want to do it alone. Or rather, he doesn't feel like he can leave Allie here when he knows she's feeling the same strange way he does. Lucy's another point of guilt in his mind, but—well, she's been a little off, too, and she's old enough to reasonably take care of herself. Particularly since she hardly has any time spent alone, constantly shuffling between all her friends and activities.

Allie’s silent on the other end; he can sense her hesitation.

"Look, it's not...like that," Harry says, trying to keep his voice somber. It's not hard, considering he still feels frayed around the edges from the anxiety. "I just feel like I can't be here right now. In West Ham. So I'm gonna go to the Greenwich house, probably until everyone comes back from the trip. And if you wanna come, you can."

Regardless, even if Allie says no he's probably still going to go. Even though he wants her to say yes.

She says yes.

"Yeah? You'll come?" He's unable to keep from sounding pleased.

"Yes," Allie confirms. "I just—there's something that's telling me..."

"...that we don't belong here?" Harry finishes for her.

"Yeah."

"Okay, well," he says, not knowing why he suddenly feels so flustered. He'd barely considered what her response might be before he called her, too caught up in the need to ask in the first place, and so he's unprepared for the little rush that goes through his veins when she agrees. "Well, uh, alright. Cool. It's my parents' beach house in Greenwich, takes about an hour-ish to get there."

"Okay."

"And there are separate bedrooms and everything, so," he adds unnecessarily.

"Most houses have those, yeah."

Right. Well. He can feel the blood in his cheeks as he clears his throat. "We can head down there tomorrow, I'll come by and get you in the morning," he says, trying to change the subject.

"Actually, could we do earlier? Like, can we just go there tonight?" She sounds nervous, but he somehow doesn't think it's because of him.

That's what Harry's plan would have been if he’d made the trip alone—he just hadn't wanted to rush her or something. Give her time to pack and also tell her parents, if they even cared. Which, it sounded like they might not. "Yeah," he says, "yeah, I guess...I'll get packed and then come."

"Okay. Text me when you're leaving."

They say their goodbyes and hang up, and Harry's hands, for a reason he can't explain, all of a sudden start to sweat. He feels jittery, a strange mixture of dread, leftover panic, and excitement swirling under his skin all at once.

Might as well channel that energy into packing—there are some supplies he needs to get together.

  
**  


As it's nearing evening that day, he pulls up by Allie's driveway.

He has no clue where Lucy had gone as the day went on, but she obviously hadn’t felt the need to let him know. His mom also wasn't home, so nobody was around to say a word when he loaded his bags into the Maserati; he doubts his mother would have said anything even if he had been home. And he's already resolved to make it up to Lucy over the summer, he'll take her to Quassy Amusement Park for the day or something.

"Wow," Allie says dryly when she opens the trunk to dump her bags inside and spots the cases of White Claw he has stacked next to his duffel. "You know Memorial Day's not for two weeks, right?"

"You know what they say. Ain't no laws," he quips, and he can feel the force of her eye roll from across the hood of the car.

"I changed my mind, I'm not going." But she says it as she's opening the passenger side door and sliding into the car, so he doesn't exactly believe her.

She looks wistfully out at her house when they pull out of the driveway. Some of the lights are still on downstairs, but no one had come outside or poked their head through any curtains to see her off, which he can understand must be upsetting. Harry doesn't know anything about her parents or home life, other than the time her mom shot him a dirty look from across the auditorium when he won first place over Cassandra in the seventh grade science fair. But they sound close—closer than Harry and his mom, in any case—and Allie is holding her elbows in either hand as she turns her neck to keep her eyes trained on her house until it's out of sight.

When they finally cross the line out of town, past the sign that's spray painted to say "Leaving West Sham," Harry breathes a sigh of relief he hadn't known he'd been holding. Next to him, Allie uncrosses her arms, relaxing her posture in the leather seat. Their air feels lighter, the world suddenly spinning at its usual angle instead of being tilted on its axis. Dusk is beginning to fall, the world going periwinkle.

"It'll be fun," Harry says, the first words between them for the entire car ride so far. "We can make it like our own trip. The beach is better than the mountains anyway."

"Hmm," Allie hums. "That's the debate of the century right there."

"C'mon. Who doesn't like the beach?"

"Someone who burns if she spends two seconds in the sun?" Allie raises her eyebrows at him, lifting the corner of her lips. She seems much brighter, suddenly, entirely shifted from earlier. "Plus it's too cold to swim right now anyway."

"The beach is more than about swimming," Harry scoffs. "It's the mood of the place. The vibe. You'll see."

"The _vibe?_ ” She sounds like she’s making fun of him. “If you say so, Bingham."

They get drive thru McDonald's for dinner at the halfway point. Allie unapologetically steals his french fries, and he threatens to throw her McNuggets out the window. At one point, she spills ketchup over the leather center console and wipes at it furiously with the hem of her shirt so it won't stain, but Harry doesn't give a shit if it does, even though it's the type of thing that would have normally pissed him off.

Something in him settles into a calm when the coastline finally is visible through the darkness. The world opens up, trees gone, nothing but distance visible on the horizon. It's chilly now that the sun is gone, but Harry still rolls down the window so he can smell the salt in the air, wind whipping through his hair and making Allie's fly all around her face, but she's smiling, too.

The beach house stands empty and dark when they pull in. No one's been in months—not that it gets much use over the winter, but the place had always been more of his dad's thing. Harry can't recall the last time Karen willingly came along, always so caught up in keeping West Ham running. Recent years have also seen it home to many beach keggers he's hosted. Kelly had always wanted to use it for a romantic weekend getaway, but somehow they never got around to that.

It's right up on the beachfront; Harry can hear the waves rolling and crashing when he leads Allie up the side patio entrance rather than going around to the front door. There’s private dock access too, and just a short distance to the marina where the sailboat is docked. Another relic of his father's; Harry had never quite taken up to that level of stereotypical New England seaman, much to his dad's disappointment.

The place is immaculate when they get inside thanks to the monthly cleaning service they have come by, even in the off season months. The sight of it brings Harry back to the weeks he spent here as a child, when Lucy was just a baby, when he would collect hermit crabs and sand dollars in a plastic bucket from the beach and his mom would have a conniption over him bringing them into the house, dripping wet sand all over the clean birch flooring.

"Nice digs," Allie comments, blinking around. "Must have been fun coming here."

"It was alright," Harry mutters. 

They stopped coming here as a family every summer after Lucy turned three. Karen claimed that she just didn't like the beach anymore, although now he thinks that maybe she got tired of spending so much time with them and didn’t know how to live when she wasn’t at her desk. For a while, Harry resorted to tagging along whenever his dad made the trip out. But eventually he stopped taking Harry on every outing, sometimes disappearing for days at a time only to show up back at the main house in West Ham smelling like saltwater and booze. Harry thinks he stopped asking to go when he turned thirteen.

He shows Allie to one of the guest rooms she can use and to the bathroom down the hall.

"Thanks for bringing me along," she says to him in the doorway. Suddenly, he feels foolish for having done so. What was he thinking? Why did it seem so imperative, at the time, to get out of West Ham? Why did she say yes? They barely know each other. What was he planning to do with her here?

Well, he has certain ideas for that last question—but the main answer is that he doesn't know. And those ideas are only tangentially related, because they would have lived in his mind whether they were here or in West Ham. She smiles at him, and he's struck again with how pretty she is. How could he ever have forgotten? It had absolutely plagued him in his younger years, even if he didn’t know it then. He ducks his head down, feeling his cheeks go warm and—God, Harry Bingham doesn't think he's ever blushed before in his life. She smiles even harder.

"Yeah, course," Harry mumbles. It's all so confusing, this: their harmless teasing here and there, coupled with the odd dread he feels when he thinks about how off-color things have been ever since everyone else left for the trip. His mind goes fuzzy if he tries too hard to analyze it, so instead he just lets it be. After all, didn't he come here to forget about all of that? Wait out the storm until things got back to normal?

"You know," Allie muses, "I know we only just got here, but there hasn't been a time in the past few days I haven't been thinking about Cassandra until now. I guess it's true, what they say about ocean air being good for you or whatever."

Harry chuckles. "I told you you'd see. It's the _vibe._ "

"Yeah, whatever. Anyway, I'm beat, so..."

"Ah, right." He moves out of the way of the door frame. "Night, Pressman."

"Night, Bingham."

Their rooms are next to each other. Harry hadn’t consciously chosen it to be like that—it’s just where the guest room is. There’s his, and his parents’, which still feels strangely off-limits even though he’s grown and they’re not here, Lucy’s, which is hardly used, and then the guest room.

They must have a shared wall between, he realizes. Harry slips under the covers after changing and brushing his teeth and scoots in close to the wall the bed is pushed up against, like he always used to do when he’d been a kid. He can just make out the sound of Allie shuffling around and it strikes him, then—her bed must just be on the other side. Effectively, they’re sleeping next to each other, just a couple inches of drywall and insulation between them.

It’s strangely comforting. Harry doesn’t think too deeply about it before he falls asleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The more they talk, the further away the dream slips from Allie’s mind, until finally she can’t remember it at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> featuring: late night conversations, jealousy, dream sequences, confessions of a certain variety, and Harry Bingham’s Boat Shoes

It’s an easy decision to say yes when Harry asks her to come with him to Greenwich.

Allie had woken up that morning in Cassandra’s bed. She couldn’t sleep the night before, tossing and turning for hours before finally getting up to crawl into her sister’s room, like she used to do when she was little. The sheets are cold but they smell like her, the same cucumber body mist from Bath & Body Works she’s been using since middle school.

Nobody wakes Allie up, and she hadn’t bothered setting an alarm either, so she opens her eyes to the silence of Cassandra’s room and the distinct feeling that something’s wrong. Lying here in Cassandra’s bed, with her decorations and clothes all around, the Harry Styles poster on the wall—it doesn’t just feel like Cassandra’s away on the field trip.

No, it feels like she’s gone. In the true sense of the word—not dead, like Allie’s thought about so many times in between surgeries and hospital waiting rooms, but rather like she’d never existed at all. _Gone._ Like this is a stranger’s room.

The feeling is terrifying, but also fleeting, occupying the liminal space in her mind between the edge of asleep and awake, when everything is still indistinct and blurry. By the time Allie’s fully awake, it’s gone.

She creeps out of Cassandra’s room, still rubbing sleep from the edges of her eyes, and nearly runs into her mom in the hallway, who’s holding a laundry basket at her hip.

“Allie,” her mom says, that same surprised note in her voice. Then it shifts into something sharper when she glances behind Allie, noticing she had come out of Cassandra’s room. “What were you doing in there?”

It sounds almost accusatory.

“Nothing? I just couldn’t sleep last night.” Allie shifts uncomfortably. Why is she looking at her like that?

“Hmm. Alright.”

She doesn’t say anything more and continues down the hallway.

When Allie passes by Cassandra’s room again later in the day, she has an inexplicable feeling that makes her reach out and try the handle. It’s locked.

She doesn’t want to admit that Harry is kind of her saving grace when he texts her. When he calls, she doesn’t hesitate for a second before hitting the green button. And then he’s inviting her along to Greenwich, in kind of a half-smooth, half-bumbling way but there’s an uneasiness in his voice too, something that mirrors the kernel of it in her mind.

Harry tells her he’ll come by tomorrow morning to pick her up. She’s sitting cross-legged on her bed while she talks to him, the door to her room slightly ajar, when her mom passes by and seems to spot Allie out of the corner of her eye. She does a little double-take, and for a second it seems like she doesn’t even recognize who Allie is.

“Actually, could we do earlier? Like, can we just go there tonight?” Her voice shakes, just a tiny bit.

Harry agrees and then they hang up. Allie worries at the edge of her thumbnail.

 _“It’ll be okay, sweetie. We’ll have fun hanging out, just the three of us, okay?”_ That’s what her dad had said when they were dropping Cassandra off at the green. In the back of her mind, Allie had kind of expected movie nights and card games, playing Old Maid around the kitchen table—like they used to do when Cassandra had overnight procedures and Allie was too worried to go to sleep.

That’s definitely not what it’s like now. Every time her parents look at her, she feels like a stranger in her own home. It scares her.

So there’s a cute boy, who she thinks maybe feels just as scared as she does for reasons they can’t name, who shows up in a fast car and offers her an alluring distraction.

She takes it. 

  


**

  
It takes her a second to remember where she is when Allie wakes up in the morning. The decor in the room is all pale blue and white, with kitschy pictures of seashells and lighthouses hanging around. And then she remembers Harry, him driving them both down to the shore, windows open, blowing away the smell of salt and grease from the fast food.

It’s awkward, waking up in someone else’s house. Especially someone you’re not exactly friends with. Allie’s never been the first person to awake during a sleepover before, but Cassandra used to complain to her about it all the time when they were younger, nothing to do besides stare at the ceiling and while the rest of your friends are asleep.

But it’s only Harry in the house, which for some reason isn’t as weird as she thought it might be. So she gets up, grabs some clean clothing, and pokes her head outside of the door. It’s silent in the hallway, and Harry’s door is closed.

She decides it’s safe enough to creep into the bathroom down the hall for a shower. When she gets out, her hair just roughly towel dried and dripping wet patches onto her shoulders because she hadn’t wanted to use the blow dryer and cause a ruckus, Harry’s door is still closed. She frowns—it must be almost ten by now.

She goes back into her room and plays around on her phone for a while, reads the news, scrolls through Instagram. Still no updates from the trip, but the celebrity content is enough to keep her occupied for a good bit, until it starts inching close to eleven and Harry’s still not up.

It’s kind of rude, she thinks, to sleep in so late when there’s a guest waiting. Although she guesses he has no real obligation to entertain her, even though he’d made it seem like he would when he asked her to come along. She blows her hair out of her face; it’s all weird since she let it air dry and didn’t get a chance to run a brush through it, curling in near ringlets rather than the soft waves she normally sports.

Finally, she gets up and marches out to the hallway and over to Harry's door, raps on it with her knuckles sharply.

"Harry?" she calls into the wood. No response.

Fuck it, she thinks. She tries the handle. It opens easily enough and—well, the room is empty. The sheets are rumpled and the blinds are twisted open, but Harry's not there.

In an instant, her pulse slams into overdrive. Her very first thought is that she’s afraid he's Gone too, Gone in the real sense of the word. Like the others—except. What is she talking about? No one is gone.

She shakes her head to herself, takes a deep breath, and backs out of his room. It's a big house. 

Instead of poking her nose around, though, she does the reasonable thing and pulls out her phone to call him. The moment he picks up, her shoulders relax. She hadn't even realized they'd been tensed up.

"Hey," she says, a little breathless after he says hello. "Are you home?"

Instantly, she feels weird calling it that. This isn't her home. It's not even his home. It's a house that goes unlived in ten out of twelve months of the year.

"Be there in like five," he replies. "Went out to get groceries, the fridge was totally empty."

"Oh. Thanks," she says, wrapping an arm around herself. Some of the leftover anxiety still coats her insides, though, and she can’t help herself when she asks, "Just let me know the next time you go out, okay?"

"Yeah, sure, sorry.” He sounds surprised, but not displeased. “I think you were still sleeping when I left."

"Yeah, I know, sorry," she says. She doesn't know what she's apologizing for. "I'm not trying to be weird or clingy—I just. I don't know. Being alone feels weird."

"Oh," he says, a soft understanding entering his voice. "No, totally. We'll go together next time."

She doubts they'll be here long enough to warrant a "next time," but she agrees.

Five minutes later, she's sort of waiting for Harry in the driveway when he pulls up. She doesn't know why part of her hadn't been fully convinced that he'd show up, even after talking with him on the phone, but it's a relief when she sees him step out of the car, a pair of sunglasses perched on his nose.

She helps him ferry the groceries inside, a bunch of giant paper Trader Joe's bags between them.

"Had a good morning?" he asks her as they unload the trunk.

"Fine," she says, hefting one bag onto her hip. "Just dicked around on Instagram, honestly."

"Any updates?"

She knows what he's talking about and shakes her head. He doesn't ask any other questions, and she doesn't elaborate. They don't want to talk about it.

"I hope you know how to cook all this stuff, because I'm hopeless," she tells him in the kitchen while they put things away in the fridge. She can't imagine Harry Bingham exactly being a pro chef, though.

"I know enough," he informs her loftily. And then he proves it when he makes pancakes for the both of them, the whole kitchen smelling like butter and maple syrup.

“Where’d you learn to do all this?” she asks him around a forkful.

“They’re my sister’s favorite,” he says. “In middle school I used to sneak into the kitchen with her in the middle of the night to make them. We ruined so many batches, but I got it down eventually.”

“That’s...actually adorable. My mom’s a total kitchen hog. Gets mad if we touch her things. Maybe that’s why I suck at cooking.”

Harry laughs. “I can’t remember the last time my mom cooked something for me.”

He doesn't sound sad about it, even though Allie’s heart gives a little squeeze in sympathy. “Your sister’s lucky to have a big brother who makes perfect pancakes for her.”

Harry smirks while drizzling syrup on his plate. “You think they’re perfect?”

“I’ll deny it if you tell anyone.”

She finishes a whole short stack, not realizing how hungry she'd actually been—it's almost noon, and this is the first thing she's eaten since the McDonald's from last night.

"So what are the plans for the day?" Allie asks while she does the dishes—only fair, since Harry cooked. It strikes her how oddly domestic this is for two people who don't actually know each other that well. He hadn't even questioned it, just moved aside to let her take over the sink space.

"It's kind of windy out, but I thought we could go down to the pier," he suggests. He's looking at her sort of curiously as she stands in front of the sink, soapy water slopped all up her forearms.

"What?" she asks self-consciously. Is there food on her face or something?

"Your hair looks different," he muses, reaching out to pluck at a lock with his fingertips.

"Oh, God, yeah," she says, embarrassed that he’s noticed. She wants to reach up and touch it, smooth it out a bit, but she's holding a wet plate and her hands are still covered in dish soap. "I just let it air dry this morning, it's not normally so...poofy."

"It's nice," he says, also taking the time to eye her up and down for the first time that day. She's wearing leggings and a plain t-shirt, stuff she'd wear to lounge around the house in, but he still looks appreciative in the way that she's come to recognize from him by now. Flattered, she hides her smile by tucking her lower lip between her teeth as she goes back to doing the dishes.

It is indeed windy when they go down to the pier, and her hair ends up whipping all around her face and becoming completely unruly, so she has to tie it up in a high bun sitting on top of her head. She thinks she catches Harry staring at her neck when she does so, but doesn't call him out on it.

It's not quite beach season yet, so even though it’s a weekend, the place is mostly empty as they peer around and window shop, save for the locals milling around and glaring at them. Allie has no idea how they can instantly tell they're not from here. Harry looks like he belongs, complete with a blue linen button down with the top two buttons undone, twill pants, and boat shoes. _Boat shoes_ —she’d pursed her lips when he put them on as they headed out the door, but refrained from asking him what it was like being a walking stereotype. So maybe it’s her who looks out of place.

In the late afternoon, Harry buys her a cup of iced tea and an iced coffee for himself, remembering her preference from the last time, like she thought he would. For dinner, he claims he doesn't want to cook twice in a day, so they order shitty delivery pizza and eat it on the balcony, listening to the sound of the waves break against the rocks. 

She doesn’t know how, but the hours seemed to have just slipped by with Harry. He’s not half as much of an asshole as she thought he was for most of her life. He opens the car door for her, offers her a drink as soon as they get inside, pays for the pizza, slides her these coy little compliments from time to time. Part of her knows it’s just because he maybe thinks she’s cute (or wants to get in her pants, she’s not blind, she can read the signs, okay—she just hasn’t figured out what she’s going to do about it yet), but at the same time she’s sort of marvelling at how, in between all that, he’s actually good company.

They do indeed crack open the White Claw later on in the night. Harry puts on _Chopped_ on Netflix and they sit around the TV in the living room, surrounded by the great ocean-facing bay windows, drinking and yelling about how idiotic the contestants are and how they’d personally make way better use of the different ingredients per round. Harry tells her she would most definitely get chopped, she admitted this morning that she couldn’t even make pancakes, and Allie threatens to spill her seltzer all over him. 

The second Allie’s head starts to drop dangerously near Harry’s shoulder (she’s not sure when they moved so close to one another), she gets up and calls it a night. Harry agrees easily enough, though she suspects that he would have let her fall asleep on him, if only she’d let herself. 

The moment she crawls into the guest bed, alone for the first time all day, Allie finds herself getting immediately sleepy, her mind blank. Today’s been a complete success when compared to the original motive for coming out here: to de-stress, get away from whatever weird, unnamed anxiety West Ham was giving her. That Harry’s actually nice to be around is just a bonus, she supposes. She hears him getting into bed, too, from behind the shared wall, the ruffle of his sheets. She smiles and closes her eyes.

That blank, uncomplicated feeling is gone after she drops off into unconsciousness, though, because as soon as Allie falls asleep, she has a dream.

Cassandra’s back home in West Ham in an empty house. In fact, the entire world feels empty in a way that is yawning and massive. She’s lying on Allie’s bed, which looks just the same as it had the morning the buses left for the trip. Her phone is held up to her face and she’s dialing a number; Allie can recognize their mom’s cell phone. Then their dad’s. And then her own. All three of them ring until the voicemail message.

“Allie,” Cassandra says to Allie’s voicemail inbox. Her voice sounds small, and she’s curled up and sweating heavily, which means her heart condition’s acting up. “I miss you. Come find me. Come find me.” 

Allie wants to reach out, lay down beside her sister, tuck her head into the sweaty crook of her arm. But she’s unable to, because she doesn’t even feel like her body is there. She’s not standing in the room with Cassandra; she’s watching the scene from above, like it’s a movie. She can’t move, can’t speak, doesn’t have a role in what she’s seeing other than as a passive observer. It’s an awful feeling.

When Allie wakes up, she’s confused about where she is for a second. But not like she’d been this morning, simply from being in an unfamiliar bedroom—this is a different kind of confusion, like her mind is stuck between the strange scene from her dream and the real world, and for a second her grasp on reality goes slack as her mind gets pulled agonizingly between the two, until she comes back to land here in the guest bedroom with the motel seashell art hung on the walls.

She also feels incredibly alone. Like she’s the only person in the entire world—like how Cassandra in her dream must have felt. 

Without thinking about it, she knocks lightly against the shared wall between her and Harry’s beds, perhaps just to prove that she isn’t really completely by herself.

“Harry?” she says out loud. She figures if the wall’s thin enough for her to be able to make out the sounds of his sheets shuffling around if she listens closely enough, then he should also be able to hear it if she speaks. “Are you awake?”

“Allie?” His voice is muffled from the wall separating them, but it doesn’t sound groggy or like he’d been asleep. “What’s up? Is something wrong?”

“No,” she lies, even though relief instantly floods her when she hears his voice. “I, um. I had a weird dream.”

“Oh...you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she says. It feels weird to talk out loud like this to a disembodied voice, while she’s lying flat on her back and staring up at the ceiling. “Just—could you just—” She loses her nerve. “Well. Actually, nevermind. Sorry to bother you. I’ll just go back to sleep.”

“No,” he cuts in. “No, what is it?”

She breathes in and out, once, twice, trying to reconcile the strange loneliness with her nerves. It’s easier in the dark. “Could you just..talk to me for a little?” Then she adds quickly, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

She hears him laugh softly from behind the wall. It’s a warm sound.

“Sure, yeah. What was your dream about?”

“Not that,” she says. “Anything but that.”

He pauses, and she thinks maybe he’s given up, is just going to ignore her and go to sleep. But then her phone vibrates on the nightstand, the screen lighting up with his name. She picks up.

“Thought this might be easier,” he says, his voice right in her ear. She can also still hear him muffled to the left of her though, in the other room. It’s weird, but it’s also kind of nice. “So what do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know. Anything.” She wonders if he can hear her too. The answer’s probably yes.

“Okay, what’s your favorite color?”

She twists her lips, a good portion of tension instantly leaving her shoulders, and latches onto the inane question. “Wow, great conversation starter. Maybe pink? Red? I don’t know. What’s yours?”

“Whatever shade of blue your eyes are.”

Allie wrinkles her nose. “Ew. Is that a line that usually works?”

“Usually,” he admits, bemused. She doesn’t know why him admitting the tactic pleases her a little bit, but it does. It feels like a small victory, like she has verbal confirmation now that all his posturing and flirting is intentional, purposeful. “I mean, it actually is blue, but not because of your eyes.”

“Oh? Then why?”

He thinks for a moment. “It reminds me of...being a kid, I think. My room used to be blue when I was younger. And my dad used to take me sailing out here over the summer. Between the sky and the water, the whole world was blue. It was nice.”

“That does sound nice.” She smiles and sits up in bed a little, cradling the phone between her shoulder and her cheek. “Were you and your dad close?”

“We used to be,” he says. She doesn’t want to push it, waits for him to continue, but he doesn’t.

She remembers the day Harry had returned to school after his father’s funeral. He had dark circles under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept. Kelly had hovered anxiously by his side, casting him unsure glances, not taking his hand the way she usually did when they walked down the hallway. He was subdued, not his usual arrogant self. Not sad, exactly, just sort of...empty. Even Cassandra had felt bad, although after a week of this behavior from Harry, she complained about him doing it for attention. Allie didn’t mention anything at the time, but she’d thought that was a cruel thing to say.

One time, right after the cast list for _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern_ had just gone up and the stage crew and theater department had their first meeting together, she caught him bent against the brick siding of the school with his head between his knees, struggling to breathe. He’d noticed her right away, stood up straight so quickly that she felt the secondhand vertigo. She was about to open her mouth and say something, maybe ask if he was okay, but then Cassandra had called to her from the parking lot and she’d turned away quickly without saying a word.

“Okay. So your favorite color’s blue,” Allie says, steering the subject away towards lighter topics. “What’s your...favorite food?”

“Does coffee count?”

“Oh good, I thought you were about to say your own pancakes.”

“I do hear they’re perfect.”

The more they talk, the further away the dream slips from Allie’s mind, until finally she can’t remember it at all. 

  


**

  
Harry loses track of how long they talk for. He doesn’t even remember hanging up or closing his eyes, just finds himself opening them and suddenly it’s light out, the sun washing the whole room in a glow. His phone is tossed somewhere next to his head, the battery nearly drained.

Allie’s incredibly easy to talk to. That’s another item to add to the list of things he’s discovering about her in the time they’ve spent together. The list so far includes her favorite food (Cheetos), her first celebrity crush (John Stamos as Uncle Jesse), her most hated pet peeves (she can't stand it when people say _fus_ trated instead of _frus_ trated).

Harry's not sure when exactly he'd fallen asleep, but it must have been late because it's nearly the afternoon now. He plugs his phone in, goes out to the bathroom to take a quick shower. Allie's door is ajar, meaning she's awake already. When he exits the bathroom, he can hear her bustling around in the kitchen downstairs, which piques his curiosity since she's supposedly an awful cook.

He hadn't been asleep at all, was just scrolling mindlessly through his phone and trying not to dwell on the lack of contact from anyone on the trip, when he heard the knock come from the wall to the right of his head. He'd already been kind of hyperaware of her presence next to him, had only managed to relax once he heard her breathing even out into sleep, which he then thought was fucking creepy of him to notice in the first place. But it couldn't be helped, he couldn't just turn his ears off.

She’d sounded different when she first called out to him. Small and...scared. Unlike herself. It made him uneasy, especially since it was hard to detect the exact emotion in her voice through the wall. So he picked up the phone and called her, leaned against the headboard, listened to her talk, asked her all sorts of pointless questions, heard the tension ease from her voice the more they chatted. He thinks he could fill a book with all the random Allie Pressman facts he has in his head now. She broke her arm when she was six falling out of a treehouse, she didn't learn how to swim until she was ten, she hates asparagus.

When Harry goes downstairs, it's to the smell of freshly brewed coffee. Allie's already pouring him a cup in the same mug he'd used yesterday, an old red Harvard one that had belonged to his dad.

"So this is what that racket was," he comments, sliding the mug over to him and breathing in deeply.

"You can just say thank you," she replies tartly, steeping her tea bag in her own mug a couple times.

"Thank you," he smiles, lifting his lips into a half-smirk, tilted to one side of his face. She bunches her lips together, like she can see right through him, but hey—a reaction is a reaction. "I thought you said you were hopeless in the kitchen, though."

"This is about the only thing I can do, besides boil an egg or make toast."

"Even though you don't drink coffee?"

"Everyone else in my family does, so I make it for them sometimes," she shrugs. "And it's a nice feeling doing things for people you care about."

She seems to realize what her words mean—that she cares about _him_ —before he does. Her cheeks go pink, which is an absolutely adorable look on her. Harry immediately resolves to try and make it happen as much as possible.

"Anyway," she says, and he can see her fighting down the blush. He hasn't even said anything yet. "It's a thank you. For last night."

The words don't help. She has to look away from him, puts a hand up to fidget with the tip of her ear and pretends to busy herself searching for sugar for her tea, even though it's right there on the counter in front of her.

"No problem," he says, letting it slide, trying not to smile. She can probably hear it in his voice, though, that he's noticed. This is the first time he's ever seen her flustered by anything—usually she takes all his passes in stride, shooting back some kind of snarky comment, incredibly quick on her feet. This, though, she's spun all on her own. Harry sips his coffee, highly amused. "It was my pleasure," he adds, just to see the tips of her ears go pink too. He thinks this might be his new favorite activity.

He also thinks that pink is most definitely Allie's color.

Since it's already past noon at this point, they decide to head into town for lunch. Harry's reluctant to let her know that his cooking prowess is basically limited to breakfast foods, after how much he'd talked up his abilities while they watched _Chopped_ last night, and how quietly impressed she'd been with his pancakes.

They drive to a cafe a few minutes away that Harry remembers going to as a kid. He would always get the grilled cheese and tomato soup, and he's more than a little disappointed when he doesn't see it on the menu, settling for a boring chicken club instead. There's outdoor seating, which Allie seems to prefer. Harry has no complaints—May in Connecticut is just about perfect weather, and the sunlight suits her, painting her hair golden in a way that he has to consciously refrain from staring at for too long. He might be a little obsessed with her hair.

"I used to have such a crush on the barista at this place when I was a kid," he tells her over their drinks—sparkling water for him, plain for her. "Her name was Erica. I would try and flirt with her while ordering my child size smoothie."

"Trying to make me jealous?" she asks, swirling the ice around her glass with the straw.

He lifts the corner of his lips, looks up at her from beneath his lashes. "Is it working?"

Allie rolls her eyes. Even doing that, she looks cute.

She says she's glad they came here because this is the first healthy-ish meal they've had in two days, and then she hogs the side order of fries they got to split, slapping his hands away when he tries to reach for one. Harry doesn't mind, is mostly enjoying watching her do it. Her nose scrunches up when he finally manages to snag one, and she gives him the stink eye as he eats it.

After they finish up (Allie insists that they split the bill, and he's not about to argue with her about the merits of chivalry—Kelly had gotten on his case about that enough for the message to sink in), Harry tells her he needs to use the bathroom and that she should wait for him in front of the cafe. He does use the bathroom, but he also purchases two mini strawberry tarts for them both from the display case in the counter service portion of the cafe. She mentioned last night her favorite fruit to eat in the summer is strawberries, and though it's not quite summer yet, he can't help but think of her when he sees them in the case, two plump strawberries sitting neatly on top of each tart.

When he comes out of the cafe, it's to the sight of Allie leaning against the side of the building talking to some random blonde guy who, in Harry's opinion, number one looks way too fucking old to be talking to her and number two is way too into her fucking space. She's giggling, and the guy leans even closer, almost looks like he's going to reach out for a casual touch on her shoulder, and yeah, Harry's seen enough.

"Am I interrupting something?" he says, striding up between them, the brown bag with his and Allie's baked goods clutched at his side.

"Oh, hey," Allie says, like she's surprised to see him show up. "No, no, we can go now. It was nice meeting you, Josh."

 _Josh_ , apparently, is completely undisturbed by Harry's sudden presence. Doesn't even acknowledge him, just gives Allie a stupid looking smile that he probably thinks looks charming. Harry thinks it makes him look like he has indigestion. "Great to meet you too, Claire. Text me, okay? We can talk more about those jet skis."

Harry doesn't know what the fuck that's about.

"Sounds great," Allie says, her voice syrupy. She turns to Harry. "Ready?"

They head off in the opposite direction as Josh. Harry's silent for a few minutes before he can't hold it in any longer; next to him, Allie is placid, blinking around at the town center completely unfazed.

"So what was all that, _Claire?_ You gonna text your new friend Josh?"

"Nah," Allie says casually, swinging her arms. "I gave him the wrong number anyway."

Harry has to duck his head down to his chest, or else he might literally scare her away with the force of how pleased he feels. "Trying to make me jealous?"

"Is it working?" There's a playful glimmer in her eyes.

"What would you say if I said it was?"

Allie tilts her head back all the way and laughs, a high, clear sound. Harry thinks he could get used to hearing it.

“Whatcha got there?” she asks him when they get back into the car and he sets the paper bag on the center console. Without waiting for him to answer, she snatches it and peeks inside. The little ‘o’ her lips form might be one of his new favorite things. 

“All for _me_?” She puts a fluttery hand to her chest, playing it up. “You shouldn’t have.”

“It’s nice doing things for people you care about,” he says, grinning. He’s been waiting to use that line all day. It works to great effect, because her lips twist up in the way he’s come to recognize means she’s embarrassed or endeared and can’t come up with a snappy response in time. And she blushes again, which is a huge plus.

They don't eat the tarts until after dinner, which is leftover pizza and some red wine that's been sitting in the rack in the kitchen for who knows how long. They only have one glass each, but it makes Allie's cheeks flush a very suitable color and she's looser, more smiley. She plucks the whole strawberry off the top of the tart and eats the pastry and custard bit first, saving the fruit for last. It's sweet and creamy, she finishes hers in about two bites and then looks like she's considering stealing a bit of Harry's, so he shoves the rest of his tart into his mouth. She purses her lips at him.

"Here, this is a trick I learned when I was a kid," she says, scooting her chair closer to him. They're outside on the patio overlooking the beach, had to clean off about an inch of dust settled over the outdoor table before they were able to set their food and drinks down. It's a clear night, a little nippy and windy this close to the water. Allie had complained about being cold and he'd lent her one of his hoodies to wear. It's just a plain black one, but it looks unfairly good on her, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows.

She takes the strawberry out of the metal pastry tin, holds it up. It's dripping with whatever sugar syrup the bakery brushed over top of it, pink rivulets starting to run down her fingers and wrist. "The best way to eat a strawberry—you eat it backwards, stem end first, and that way you get the sweetest part last."

She demonstrates. Harry stares.

It takes a few seconds before the ability to speak returns to him. "You were gonna wait until I already ate mine to tell me that?"

"Maybe if you shared I wouldn't have waited," she says primly. "You want a taste that bad, Bingham?"

She bats her eyes and wipes strawberry juice from her hands.

Fuck. Okay. Yeah, she definitely knows what she's doing to him. 

  


**

  
That night, Harry dreams of a vast, empty town.

It comes in flashes, little scenes of things he can’t string together into anything cohesive. A crowded chapel, completely trashed. Road asphalt that crumbles, weeds and undergrowth splitting through the laid blacktop, into complete wilderness where there should be the bridge that crosses out of West Ham. A solar eclipse darkening the sky, the bright ring of sunfire hovering around the edges of the black moon. Garbage piling up in the streets. People arguing, people crying—about what, he can’t make out, but he does recognize the people. Kelly, Luke, Gwen, Cassandra, Jason, Clark, Grizz, countless others from his class.

And over everything lies a deep, wallowing sense of despair and loneliness, though it doesn't feel like it's of his own brand that he got a little too accustomed to after his father's death. No, it’s like he can access the emotions of everyone he sees in those brief scenes, experiences them almost like they’re his own, though subtly different, more detached. There are moments of joy, fleeting and shallow that he associates with the flashes of people partying in abandoned houses, but mostly it's confusion, sadness, anger, fear, all jumbled together like a large brick that hits him square in the chest, knocking the breath out of his lungs, intermingling with his own disorientation and anxiety.

When he opens his eyes, his heart racing and his mind strained at the seams, it's to a figure standing over his bed.

"Jesus," he breathes out, startled at the sight, scrambling backwards across the sheets. But it's only Allie, of course it is.

"Sorry," she whispers, fumbling at the hem of her t-shirt. Even in the darkness, she looks paler than usual. "I had another weird dream. And I figured you wouldn't mind."

He's still reeling a bit from his own dream, too frayed and bewildered to come up with a coy line that he might have slipped her if he was feeling like his normal self. So instead, Harry just nods, scoots over in bed as she slides in. She's not wearing any pants, but the bed's big enough that their legs don't touch, and it’s something that he only distantly notices, still too caught up in his head.

"Makes two of us," Harry says into the room.

"Yeah?" She's not facing him, her hair splayed out across the pillow, ending in wispy curls by his face. "You seemed scared when I woke you. Sorry."

"It's fine."

This feels weird. This is definitely not how Harry had imagined his first time sharing a bed with Allie would go. But he also doesn't hate it, and there's a strange comfort that comes from feeling the dip of the mattress from her body, even if she's an appropriate distance away.

"You wanna talk about it?"

He scrubs a hand over his face. "No. Not really."

"Me neither," Allie whispers.

It's a little scary how easily the dream extracts itself from his memory now that she's by his side. In what feels like no time at all, it's barely a distant recollection, and he's closing his eyes and slipping under, listening to the girl next to him breathe. 

  


**

  
Allie slips out of bed before Harry's awake.

She doesn't know if it's him being a gentleman or if it's because he'd been genuinely too tired and confused at her sudden appearance, but he hadn't reached out in the night or anything untoward like that, and when she wakes up, he's still sleeping dutifully on his half of the bed, which she appreciates. His eyelashes are unfairly long, she notices, and he has tiny beauty marks dotted like stars over his face. In particular, there are two of them, one on top of the other, next to the corner mouth that she thinks are especially charming, but she knows she can never tell him so. His reaction would be absolutely unbearable. If this were another life, maybe she'd reach out and stroke them, or at least lie here in bed and stare at him a little while longer.

But she feels restless and strange, just like she had when she'd woken up yesterday, though she can no longer put her finger on why. The dream that had spurred her into throwing back the covers in the guest bed and creeping into Harry's room is already forgotten, all details and distinction lost. All she can remember about it now is how it had made her feel: scared, alone, and hopeless.

A run on the beach sounds about perfect, a good way to channel her energy into something productive. So she sidles out of bed as quietly as she can, treads over to her room to dig through her duffel for some leggings and a sports bra. Also not to mention she's been doing nothing but lazing around with Harry and eating junk food for the past—God, how long has it been? Two, three days?

That can't possibly be right, but she counts the days backwards in her head to make sure. She feels like she's spent a lifetime out here already. Time seems to move differently here, in this big beach house. Or maybe it’s just when she’s with Harry.

She sends him a quick text letting him know where she's gone, and then sets out.

Allie soon discovers that running on the beach is not as easy as she thought it'd be. It's hard and slow-going since there's barely any resistance from the sand like there would be on pavement, which she's used to. She starts out where it's too dry and it feels like she's barely moving, grains flying up from beneath her heels and hitting her calves, getting all in her shoes. And then she gets too close to the water when she moves further down, accidentally miscalculates her distance to an incoming tide. The water comes rushing in, completely soaking her sneakers and socks. And she also hadn't accounted for how bright the sun would actually be this morning and goes out only in her sports bra and a ponytail, so she can already feel the sunburn starting to form over her shoulders.

Fed up, she stomps, in as much as one can across a beach, up to the flimsy boardwalk so she can jog home, saltwater and sand squelching uncomfortably in her shoes the whole time.

Inside, the first thing she does is kick off her sneakers, leaving them to dry on the patio, and peel off her soaking wet socks.

There's an amused sort of noise that comes from the kitchen; Allie looks up to see Harry peering over his shoulder at her while he attends to bacon sizzling away in a pan. There's already toast and orange juice set out on the island, as well as an assortment of sliced apples and bananas.

"I've decided I hate the beach," Allie declares, letting her hair down and leaning over the island to pluck at an apple slice. She pretends not to notice the way Harry's gaze lingers on her a bit too long because she's not wearing a shirt, until the bacon is nearly about to burn and he's forced to turn away.

"I will not allow that," Harry says, sliding the bacon off the pan onto a paper towel-lined plate that he sets on the counter. They're extra crispy, almost black, but Allie actually prefers them that way, though she doesn't tell him so when she crunches into a piece.

"Too bad," Allie says, "it's already decided."

"Then I guess I'll just have to change your mind." He has that voice again, the smooth one.

The thing with Harry is: she can never tell when he's about to be smooth or bumbling. Sometimes it's easy to roll her eyes and tell him off for being kind of an idiot, or throw a line right back at him and watch him turn red. But when he's on, he's _on_. And he's on right now—his hair's still all messy from just having woken up, he's wearing a plain white t-shirt that sits unfairly well across his shoulders, he hasn't shaved yet which is weirdly working for her, he's just cooked her _breakfast_ , for God’s sake, and he's looking at her from beneath those stupid, dark lashes.

In lieu of replying, Allie bites into a piece of toast and busies herself with eating, hoping that she can pass off the redness in her cheeks as from the exercise. Even though she barely did anything, but Harry doesn't necessarily know that.

They spend the day pretty much lazing around. Allie takes a shower and is about to blow dry her hair, and then pauses, remembers how Harry had seemed to like it when it was naturally curled, but then feels stupid for wanting to alter her appearance for a boy and blow dries it anyway. Harry does the _New York Times_ crossword on his phone, because of course that's how he spends his time, while Allie pokes around the house.

She hadn't explored the place before now, and Harry doesn't seem to mind, just idly answers her questions whenever she points something out and asks him about it. The bottled mini ship models belonged to his father, yes they were extremely tedious and boring to assemble, the DVD collection of Barbie Life in the Dreamhouse gathering dust on the old player belongs to his sister, the small chip in the corner of the wooden pillar between the living room and patio door had been from when Harry had run into it while carrying a metal sand shovel when he'd been maybe six or seven.

As much as she's learned about Harry, between their late night phone chat and spending the days with him, she's also learned that she...likes being with Harry. Likes finding out things about him—how he's never broken a bone, how he still drives his sister to soccer practice most weekends. Likes observing his behavior, even when it's obnoxious, like when he compulsively checks himself out in every mildly reflective surface. Likes the way he checks her out, too—it's nice, being looked at like that. By him, specifically.

She just...likes Harry. And it's not some big, dawning realization. It kind of just _is._ She just hasn't figured out what she's going to do about it yet.

When there's nothing left to point out (there are no family photos or anything like that in the entire house, Allie's noticed), she joins him on the couch and puts on _The Great British Bake Off,_ though it melts into background noise as they bicker about what to do for dinner.

Harry's insisting that they go into town, eat somewhere nice with actual menus and waiters, Allie argues that they shouldn't bother with the whole affair and should just order in instead (she's already called him out on only being able to cook breakfast and he'd looked properly needled about it).

Harry wins in the end, because he promises to buy her dessert and then lists off the items from the menu he has pulled up on his phone. It annoys her how he's already come to realize in such a short span that she can be easily bargained with food. Especially junk food.

He takes her to one of those new age, hipster-y farm-to-table restaurants where they have fancy names for simple dishes and all the decor is "rustic," which means there's just a lot of exposed brick and wood everywhere. Harry insists that she gets the truffle pasta, which she thinks means he also wants it in addition to his own order and is planning to steal from her plate. He should already know better by now, but she agrees anyway, because she can and will finish the whole portion by herself.

As she swirls her glass of sparkling water (Harry had refused to let her get just plain tap water, the fucking snob), Allie puts her chin in one hand and asks him, "Is this a date?"

Harry accidentally rips the piece of country bread loaf he's holding clean in half, forcefully, but he recovers quickly.

"Do you want it to be?"

She presses her lips together, looks up at the ceiling. "Ask me again at the end of the night."

The food, to Allie's mild annoyance, is excellent. She does let him have some of her pasta, but only because he cuts a quarter of his burger and slides it onto her plate without prompting, which, for the first time in all the time she's spent with Harry Bingham, actually gives her butterflies. For dessert they split some kind of fancy, deconstructed lemon-ginger cake with vanilla ice cream on top. She fights him for the last bite and wins, but he doesn't look mad when she triumphantly puts the spoon in her mouth, smiling around the metal.

Before the bill comes, Harry’s looking at her curiously, a little smile etched onto the corner of his lips. He always stares, but this one feels a lot more pointed, like he’s marveling at something he sees in her.

“What?” she asks, tucking her hair behind her ear.

He opens his mouth, then pauses for a second. “I just didn’t know you. Like, at all.” He sounds like he can’t believe it. Allie hardly can herself.

“Yeah? And now?”

“Well I can’t say I know everything,” he muses, leaning back in his chair. “But I like what I’ve learned so far.”

Allie ducks her head down, studies the grain in the wooden table so she doesn’t have to meet Harry’s eyes. “Me too.”

When they're leaving the restaurant, it's to the realization that somehow, over the course of their dinner, it's started pouring rain outside. Which is a major letdown because they'd parked the car several blocks away, specifically for the purpose of enjoying the walk after having a large meal.

"I can pull the car around if you want to wait here," Harry tells her. He doesn't look enthused at the idea. Neither of them have umbrellas or jackets or anything.

"Or," Allie says, dragging out the word, the idea coming to her all at once. "I'll race you back."

She barely gives Harry time to look at her before she darts off. She knows he's following her, because he yells "Hey!" indignantly the moment she starts running, and she can hear his footsteps on the wet pavement behind her. The rain pelts at her, sticking her hair into her face, splashing up the hem of her jeans when she runs through puddles. But she's laughing wildly, and so is Harry, who has caught up to her significantly despite her head start. Her competitive side boots into gear and she speeds up, the air smelling fresh and new. People stare as they run past, but she doesn't care, lets out a victorious whoop when she reaches his car first by a long shot.

She stays panting outside the passenger side door as he catches up, pulls the door open as he gets his keys out and presses unlock so she can slide in and get out of the rain. Her hair's definitely a mess and parts of her body are varying degrees of both damp and soaked. But she's smiling wide when Harry gets in next to her, still catching his breath, his hair similarly stuck across his forehead. He pushes it up and out of the way, and looks devastatingly good as he does so.

"You don't play fair," he complains, starting the car. "You run track or something? Why are you so fast?"

"I'm not that fast, you're just wearing fucking Sperrys," Allie says, tying her wet hair into a ponytail out of her face.

Harry laughs out loud at that, a full-bodied kind of laugh. Allie joins him. She feels like she’s floating as they drive back closer to the coast, rain pattering down all around them.

"So," he asks her when they pull up back at the house, "date, or no?"

She raises her eyebrows at him. "Well, the night's not over yet."

They kick their shoes off and go down the patio steps, down to the sand overlooking the Long Island Sound. It's stopped raining but the ground is still wet, so they sit on the very last step, passing back and forth the remainder of the bottle of red wine they had with the pizza the other night, not bothering with glasses.

It's silent between them for the first time that day. Allie leans back and looks out at the rolling waves, rumbling and swollen from the rain, everything around them smelling like saltwater. It's dark, but she can still make out the wavering line between ocean and sky if she tries hard enough. The sand is cool beneath her toes, and it's chilly, but she feels warm from the wine and from Harry next to her, his arm pressed against hers. She's finally starting to feel ready to address whatever they have going on.

"I've never been on the beach at night," she reflects, resting her elbows on her knees. "It's kind of nice."

"Told you I'd change your mind," he says, elbowing her lightly.

"You didn't do anything," she says, even though it'd been his idea to come out here once they saw it had stopped raining.

"Sure." He sounds like he's just humoring her. "One time I tried going swimming in the middle of the night. I only got in the water up to my knees before my dad pulled me out, I think he damn near had a stroke."

She snorts. "The hell were you thinking?"

"That's what my dad said," Harry laughs. "My mom was...not happy." He leaves it at that. He doesn’t like talking about his parents, she’s come to realize. She can’t exactly blame him.

She turns her head towards him, observes him next to her. He looks contemplative, gazing out at the waves instead of at her, the wind ruffling through his hair that, despite how messy and rain-soaked it'd been before, has somehow dried in a perfect, careless style that she would have thought was manicured had she not witnessed its natural process herself. Hers is down across her shoulders now, frizzy and curling everywhere from having gotten wet.

"Did you ever think the two of us would end up out here like this?" she asks him, handing the wine over.

He doesn’t answer right away, smiling to himself for a second like he has a private joke in his mind. "I mean, sort of? Not exactly like this, but I used to daydream about you all the time."

She looks at him strangely, because the answer for her is obviously no. "What are you talking about?"

Harry laughs, his eyes crinkling up at the corners. "What? You were my first crush, Pressman." He sounds entirely too casual about the confession, like he’s matter-of-factly telling her about the weather or his weekend plans or anything else mundane, though there’s an amused glimmer in his eye.

Her eyebrows fly up. "Excuse me?"

"My first kiss, too."

"Your _what_ now?" She's convinced he's just spinning a story for her at this point.

"You really don't remember that?" Harry asks. "You ran up to me on the playground at recess and just planted one on me. I think for a dare, but I don't know, you ran off after."

She’s stunned speechless for a solid thirty seconds. She does remember being called a daredevil when she was younger, went through a phase of telling everyone she knew to double-dog-dare her to do something crazy, just because she liked the challenge. But if she kissed Harry during that phase, she certainly can’t remember it now. " _No_ I didn't," Allie says finally.

"Hand to God."

"No. I did _not_ do that."

He looks at her, tilts his head in a way that says, _'yeah, you kinda did.'_

Flashes of an old, old memory come up now—a confused boy, squinting up at her in the sunlight, grass stains on his knees. Just a quick, dry peck, the look on his face utterly shocked as she drew away. The way her friends cheered in disbelief when she sprinted back across the blacktop to them. The way he wouldn’t quit staring at her at school for the next few days, even though she didn’t think it was a big deal at all, at the time. Jesus Christ, Harry Bingham really was her first kiss.

"How old was I?"

"I don't know, like, eight or something."

"Okay, well, I can't take responsibility for anything I did when I was eight."

"Mhm. And what about now?" He's leaning closer to her, the wine bottle set down on the sand below their feet. This feels like the moment that all this has been leading up to. Allie thinks it's kind of perfect. She's ready to let it happen. Wants it to, even.

"What are you asking?" she asks coyly. She knows. He knows too. But she likes this game they're playing.

"I think you have an idea," he says, reaching out to brush her hair back behind her neck. He keeps his hand there, warm against the skin of her collarbone, leans in close. He smells like rain.

"What would Cassandra say if she saw this?" She closes her eyes, enjoying the feeling of his hand on the back of her neck, the tip of his nose tracing below her ear. She could easily turn her head, and they'd be kissing. She will, in just a second.

"Who?" Harry murmurs, lips close to hers.

Allie freezes.

_Who?_

The name had slipped out of her mouth automatically, naturally. But recognition isn't there—she can't put a face to the name. Which feels entirely, indisputably _wrong_.

Harry feels her stiffen up and draws away immediately.

"Sorry," he's saying, taking his hands off her. "Was that not—"

"What did you just say?" Allie asks, turning to him fearfully.

"What?"

"You asked me who Cassandra was."

Harry furrows his eyebrows, looking like he's struggling to remember. "Who is she?"

Allie suddenly feels like crying. The name Cassadnra feels incredibly important to her, beyond words being able to describe but she can’t put her finger on why. And she knows, deep in her core, that that’s not right. That something is wrong here, something’s shifted in the past few days alone. What's happening to them? What's happening to her?

"She's...my sister," she finally says, the words forced out of her lips, clawed out of her memory like they've been pulled up against a strong current going in the opposite direction. "She's my sister." She repeats it like it's a reminder to herself more than anything else.

Harry only looks more confused, like there's a similar mental battle going on in his own mind. Allie tries hard to remember how she’d ended up here, in this very spot, on this very night, tries to find an explanation other than Harry Bingham being cute and letting him charm her into actually liking him.

They came here for a reason. One that had slipped away from her since they got here, washed away with the tide and the isolation and the whirlwind of teenage feelings. She hadn't even realized it had been happening. They came here to...escape something in West Ham. As a distraction. From a feeling that something was irrevocably wrong and out of place. How had she forgotten?

But now it's hitting her—she hasn't checked her phone in days for messages she knows aren't there. Hasn't checked social media, either. Hasn't thought about anyone who had left on the trip, hell, her own parents haven't even called or texted once to check up on her, and she hadn't even told them she was planning on being gone for so many days. She thinks about the dreams that come to her at night--can’t remember what had happened in them, but knows they’d shaken her badly. She thinks about how the moment she and Harry had crossed out of West Ham boundaries the night they came out here, she instantly felt like something had been eased from her mind.

"What's happening to us?" Harry asks. He has a tortured look on his face, like he's coming to the same realizations as she is. "Why can't I remember anyone?"

She knows what he means. Cassandra's face is only now swimming in front of her eyes, forced to the surface by sheer willpower. Countless others are still under the surface.

There was always a deadline on this little beach trip of theirs, she realizes with a mounting sense of dread. She and Harry weren't just going to spend the rest of their lives out here in Greenwich, even though it had felt a little bit like that only a few minutes ago.

"Harry, what day is it?" she asks him, afraid of the answer. He has to check his phone, because like her, he can't automatically name it off the top of his head.

"Wednesday."

She does the math in her head. It's been ten days.

"They should have been back by now." As she says the words, she feels a stone drop into the pit of her stomach.

The night around them, so soothing and welcoming around them before, turns darker, more sinister. The sound of the waves crashing against the beach is deceptively peaceful, hypnotic, lulling her into a false sense of security, like they're carrying her memories out to sea, floating and lost to the banks of her mind. 

Allie knows if she turned to Harry and kissed him like she was planning to, let herself get lost in that, the tide would have pulled her under.

They both look at each other simultaneously, and she knows they're thinking the exact same thing.

They have to go back to West Ham.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> must there be a “plot?" is it not enough to have harry and allie flirting with each other for ten thousand words?
> 
> [tumblr](https://dystopians.tumblr.com/) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/harrybinghams)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I wish I'd known you before all this," she confesses without looking at him, her thumb bushing against the outside edge of his wrist bone once, twice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do i have a good reason for this chapter being 16k long? nope
> 
> featuring: an unnecessarily long discussion about coins, unnecessarily long discussions in general, la croix™️, and...milfs?

They drive back to West Ham that night.

There are a decent amount of other cars on the road with them as they take the ramp onto the freeway, which is a comforting sign. Like there are still people out there in the world living their daily lives, going to and from where they come. That doesn’t stop Harry from white-knuckling the steering wheel though, or pressing down on the gas a little harder than he should. 

Next to him Allie is silent, fretting at her thumbnail in between her lips. Whatever moment they’d been having had been effectively killed off the second she had turned those fearful eyes on him and asked him what he said, but it hadn’t truly hit Harry until they were both in his car and driving away, the strange enchantment over his mind melting with every inch of pavement behind them, the closer they get to West Ham.

“Remember how I wanted to talk to you after my dream?” Allie says, her arms wrapped around herself. Harry nods, not trusting himself to speak. He feels like a stranger in his own body, his mind not his own. “I’d forgotten about it by the morning. But it’s starting to come back to me now. Just bits and pieces.”

Harry nods again. The same thing is happening to him, made all the more confusing because he can’t connect the dream sequences resurfacing in his mind to any particular occurrence. Like disjointed scenes out of a movie for which he doesn’t have the context, they’re just split-second flashes, distant wisps of consciousness from a stranger’s eyes. It’s all jumbled up, missing an anchor or constant for him to be able to make sense of any of it.

“In my dream,” she continues, “I saw Cassandra. She was trying to call my phone and telling me to come find her. What about yours?”

Cassandra. Harry knows who she is now, beyond Allie just naming her as her sister. He can’t believe he’d ever forgotten, frankly. It seems absurd. What’s even more absurd, though, is that it’s taken Harry until now to remember Kelly’s name, and Grizz, and Luke. There are a bunch of others, too, many of them still faces without names and vice versa. 

“Mine was just flashes,” he tells her, his mouth dry. “Couldn’t really make sense of any of them, but. It’s still coming back to me.”

“Yeah.”

They’re getting closer to the exit that’ll take them directly into West Ham now, the highway sign looming and reflected green above them against the night sky. Harry puts on his turn signal and moves into the right hand lane, taking the long, curving exit at a slower pace, finally easing back on the gas. Still faster than they should be going according to the posted sign, though; the car tilts as they make the turn, and Allie puts her hand up to the grab handle to keep herself steady.

“Can I tell you something?” she says, her voice quieter than before. Harry spares a glance over at her; she’s white as a sheet and her eyes are wide, turned towards him.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t...I don’t think they’re coming back.”

He swallows. Somehow, this doesn’t feel at all like new information. It’s like he’s always known it, deep down, and was just choosing to ignore it. From the moment he’d woken up late the day they all left, if he’s being honest.

“I don’t think so either.”

Another glance at Allie tells him she feels the same. She doesn’t look shocked and doesn’t say it like it’s some kind of revelation. Instead, she sounds resigned and defeated, the corner of her lip tucked between her teeth. Saying it out loud makes it real—they’ve both figured that out by now.

He’s busy looking at her, so as they’re coming out of the exit and onto the surface road that takes them into West Ham, just past the spray painted sign welcoming them into town, he misses whatever it is that makes Allie grab his arm suddenly with one hand and point out the windshield frantically with the other.

“ _Harry!_ Shit, stop!”

His eyes flick back to the road just in time to see a flash of white dart out in front of the car. Instinctively, he slams on the brakes so hard that the tires squeal. The seat belt cuts a painful line across his front as they’re both carried forward by inertia and then jammed back against the leather seats, the wind nearly knocked from his lungs.

“What the fuck?” he breathes.

There’s a dog in front of their car, directly in the headlights, some kind of black and white border collie. It’s not doing anything, just standing and staring at them head on, its tongue lolling out of its panting mouth. Seems like it had run out onto the road and then just stopped, right in front of their vehicle.

“Is that a _dog?_ ” Allie asks, bewildered. “What’s it doing? Should we help it?” She makes an aborted movement like she wants to get out of the car. Harry doesn’t know the answer, is still reeling from almost having hit it. Thank God no one else is on the road now that they’re off the freeway; they’re stopped in the middle of it, surrounded by just the dense thicket of trees that they have to pass through in order to get into West Ham proper.

Before she can get her seat belt unbuckled, though, the dog darts off into the underbrush, disappearing into the darkness.

“The fuck—should we go after it? Where did it even come from?” Allie rolls down the window and tries to peer into the night to see if she can spot it.

“No offense, Allie,” Harry says, feeling thin and worn, his heart still beating rapidly in his chest, “but I think we have bigger things to worry about right now.”

Allie leans back in her seat, casting her eyes away from the open window. “Yeah, you’re...probably right.” She sounds regretful about it, though, which—even with all that’s gone on tonight—he still thinks is kind of cute.

“It’s not like we hit it,” Harry says gently, finally removing his foot from where it’s been pressing way too hard on the brake. They begin rolling along slowly. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. Especially in a town like this, owner’s bound to be looking. People don’t just let their dogs run away.”

“Yeah,” Allie says, putting her hand up to her forehead wearily. “Yeah, you’re right. Okay, let’s just go.”

The question of ‘where to’ hangs in his mind, but he doesn’t ask it yet, not while they’re still on the outskirts of town. After they turn off the road that leads into town and closer to the main strip, other cars appear, though not very many at this time of night. Harry lets out an internal sigh; part of him had been afraid that, like the flash in his dream, they’d return to a completely empty town.

“Can you—is it okay if I don’t—” Allie begins, fumbling over her words as he turns onto the street that, if he made the next left, would lead to her neighborhood.

Harry gets what she’s saying. She doesn’t want to go home. She’s scared. He is, too.

So he nods, says “yeah, I got you,” and drives them to the only inn in town, a small boutique bed and breakfast for people bored and white bread enough to want to come to a place like West Ham for fun. He’s not sure if it would be more fitting if they had to stay in some kind of cheap, roadside motel with only one bed in true horror/thriller movie fashion.

The attendant at the front desk looks them up and down skeptically when they enter, purses her lips and raises a single eyebrow when he asks for a double room for the night while Allie hangs back. Then Harry uses the voice that he does around adults and teachers to get what he wants, turns on the charm and lies and says they’re cousins and they’re here to visit family but the house unexpectedly flooded and they just need a place to stay for the night. And then he slides his Amex black card across the counter. Their double room is booked fairly quickly after that. Allie takes a pause from looking restless and scared to raise her eyebrows pointedly at him as he hands her a keycard.

“That always work?” she asks as they make their way up the single staircase in the lobby up to their second floor room.

Harry shrugs. “Pretty much,” he says, figuring there’s no point in lying to her. She must know his deal pretty well by now.

“Must be a hard way to live life.” She’s being sarcastic—a good sign.

He considers making a quip about how being good at getting positive attention from strangers is the result of being neglected by his parents, but he doesn’t think he has a strong enough layer of irony for that yet, and humor’s never really been his choice of coping mechanism. Plus he thinks Allie would take it seriously, had caught the way her eyes would turn briefly sad whenever he casually mentioned either of his parents back at the beach house. He doesn’t know if he’d be able to bear that, right now.

Their room is appointed fairly nicely, if not a little bland, with generic modern art of shapes and lines and shit hanging from the walls. There are two double beds next to each other in the center, about two or three feet spanning between them for the shared nightstand.

His stomach is finally starting to feel more settled now that they’ve made it back to West Ham without the world somehow collapsing down around them. Allie takes the bed nearest to the wall, sitting down on it heavily and holding her head between her hands for a few silent moments.

“What are we going to do?” she finally asks from behind a curtain of hair. “What are we doing here?”

Harry has no answers for her. A dull ache starts to form behind his temples if he thinks about it, his mind too inundated with new information and remembered memories to be able to conduct any kind of higher reasoning. What he wants right now, more than anything, is a fucking drink. And to go to sleep—it’s nearly midnight.

“I don’t know,” he tells her truthfully.

“Maybe we should go to the authorities?” she suggests, finally emerging from behind her hair curtain. “File a missing persons report.”

“For like, two hundred people?”

“It’s just an idea,” Allie says defensively. “I don’t know what else we can do.”

“What would we even tell them? We don’t have proof of anything.”

“The proof is that they’re literally _not here,_ ” Allie snaps. “Hence, _missing._ ”

He doesn’t know why he feels so hopeless about it. It’s not even a bad idea, all things considered. Harry just gets an uneasy feeling when he thinks about letting other people in on what he actually thinks happened.

Logically, he knows if they haven’t returned by now, it’s because the buses got into some kind of horrible accident. Or they did make it to the mountains and have been forced to stay a few extra days because of rock slides blocking the roads, or some other practical reason like that.

There’s no reasonable explanation that justifies the notions he actually has, though. The ones that circulate in his mind, connected to words like _trapped_ and _gone_ and _vanished._ Kidnapping crosses his mind briefly, but it falls into a similar category as the weird shit.

They get tired of arguing about it after barely a minute. He doesn’t have it in him right now. Allie says she’ll go to the police alone if he doesn’t want to come, and he’s not her keeper, so. There’s nothing more to debate about. Tomorrow they’ll go down to the station.

He feels bone-tired, sinks directly into the blankets and pulls them all the way up over his head when they turn the lights out. If he wanted to, he could pretend a wall exists instead of the two feet of blank space between his and Allie’s bed, that they’re back at the beach house and he’s listening to the girl he likes fall asleep.

Harry doesn’t believe in fate or any stupid shit like that, but it does feel almost divinely predetermined that Allie, out of all people, is the one he’s been stuck with in all this. Despite everything, that’s something he feels a little thankful for. 

  


**

  
He’d expected the dreams to come. It’s a given, really, the moment he closes his eyes.

Same as before, they come in flashes, but slower this time. Enough for him to be able to make out snippets of conversations, plus he can finally recognize who he’s actually looking at now.

He sees inside Kelly’s living room, a group of girls including Gwen, Erica, and Madison, listing off names of guys for ‘Fuck, Marry, Kill.’ His name is absent among them, which he knows for a fact (sue him, okay) is not how it usually goes. Then Kelly walks into the room, and they all shush each other quickly.

Jason, standing on top of a cop car in the city center parking lot, blowing an ear-splitting air horn and yelling at fugitives to get moving. Engines revving, people scattering in all directions, the whole fucking town is fair game.

A girl he sort of recognizes, but doesn’t know the name of—she’s in the junior class, he knows, he thinks it starts with a G, she’s got red hair—sitting patiently on the benches outside the green, alone, in the middle of the pouring rain.

Kelly and Will, cross-legged on the floor of the local supermarket in the pasta aisle, an open laptop and notebooks next to them, a pencil tucked behind Kelly’s ear. She’s saying she’s never done this before, counted up everything inside a grocery store.

Lexie and a bunch of the weird art kids sitting in a circle on the green with a stack of rocks in the middle, performing some kind of druidic ritual. Cassandra, Helena, and Gordie watching impassively from the gazebo as the weirdos ask the sky to give them answers. Then the solar eclipse, the same one he’s seen before in his previous dream, the moon blotting out the sun, the world suddenly turning dark. People all around in various states of shock and confusion, some saying it’s a sign, some yelling at others not to stare directly into it.

Through the darkness, Harry suddenly feels like he’s present for the first time, not like he’s just watching it all from a distance. There’s ground beneath his feet and feeling on his skin from the outside air. He turns his head experimentally, his view now narrowed down to what his eyes can see rather than through a wide-lens shot.

And what he sees is Allie, sitting on the steps of the gazebo, staring straight at him while everyone else around them squints up at the sky. In an instant, Harry knows a number of things. 

One: the Allie he’s seeing is the same one he’s spent the last few days with, and the both of them aren’t really _there_ like the others are. They’re visitors, getting a glimpse. 

Two: those around them, all the people who had been milling around them mindlessly on the grass or performing weird rituals, they really are looking up at the heavens, and there really is a solar eclipse, somewhere out there. It’s real.

Three: the moment he sets eyes on Allie, the rest of the world becomes detached, distant and static. She’s the anchor he’d been missing before, the constant. Like he’d forgotten he’d been holding his breath all this time and finally is able to inhale at the sight of her.

Then the dream ends, though Harry doesn’t wake up. It’s a fade to black, his mind finally dropping off into unthinking dark. 

  


**

  
In the morning, Allie finally knows exactly where she is.

She lies in bed, the sheets starchy and stiff, and has a quiet, mini-panic attack about it before she’s fully awake, staring at the popcorn ceiling in the gray darkness. The blackout curtains are drawn, and she can only tell it’s morning by the glow outlining them past the lump of Harry’s body under the covers the next bed over.

They must have had the same dream. Or at least, the same last scene of it—she knows he’d looked at her and felt what she’d felt. Though if she tells him about it after he wakes up and he asks her what she’s talking about, she thinks she might actually cry.

They have to go to the police today. That’s the only real plan of action they have, though the thought of it makes Allie feel sick. She really doesn’t want to have to explain to another person why she feels the way she feels, the strange, indescribable, almost preternatural clairvoyance she has when it comes to the people who are gone. But the fact that they’re gone should be enough—it’s over two hundred kids, after all. People are bound to notice their absence.

Then Allie remembers Cassandra’s locked bedroom door and the blank look on her parents’ faces whenever her name had been brought up, and suddenly she’s not so sure anymore.

Maybe that’s why she’s not willing to go back home just yet. Because she knows, in some part of her, that her mom and dad won’t care, won’t do anything, or won’t even know what she’s talking about. They’re normally the kind of parents who message their family group chat at least once a day just to check in on everyone. But there hasn’t been a single one sent since the day Cassandra left, including the past couple days where Allie had gone quite literally without a word to Greenwich with Harry.

The first thing she notices when she picks up her phone from where it’s charging on the nightstand is that there are indeed no messages—from her parents, Cassandra, or anyone at all. That doesn’t surprise her.

The second thing she notices is that the date, right smack dab in the center of her wallpaper, tells her it’s Wednesday, May 19th. She does a double take, unlocks her screen, checks her calendar app just in case. Then the weather app. Then the news. All of them tell her it’s Wednesday.

Which was yesterday.

She sits up in bed, glances surreptitiously over at Harry, whose only exposed part is the top of his head of dark brown hair, before snatching his phone off of his side of the nightstand. It’s password protected, but his lockscreen tells her it’s Wednesday, too.

A very strange thing happens, then: instead of freaking out, something clicks into place in Allie’s mind. A truth that she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge before, but is now plain for her to see.

“Harry,” she hisses over at the lump of his body. Then she swings her own legs off of her mattress, sitting properly upright so she can lean across the aisle separating their beds and poke him in what she thinks must be his shoulder. It’s hard to tell, buried as he is under the covers. “Harry, wake up.”

“The fuck do you want,” he mumbles groggily, his voice muffled under the sheets. She pokes him again, more forcefully this time, and his head emerges. He doesn’t look well rested at all, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, hair all ruffled and sticking every which way. She doesn’t know if she’s still allowed to think it’s cute, given everything. She realizes with an inner jolt that it was just last night that they almost kissed; it feels like a lifetime ago, now.

“What day is it?” she asks him, battling against a strong sense of déjà vu.

“What? It’s Thursday,” he says, scrubbing a hand across his face. There’s crust at the corners of his eyes, she notices, and it’s weirdly comforting to see. Like, he’s just another person, and he’s here with her in the same freaky situation.

“Wrong, try again,” Allie says, tossing his phone over onto his blankets. He wakes the screen and squints at it uncomprehendingly for a few seconds before unlocking it. She can tell he’s cycling through the same apps that she had, looking for confirmation, looking for an explanation.

He doesn’t have the same click into place as she does though. If anything, he looks bewildered as all hell, finally pushing himself upright in bed and sitting with his back against the headboard. Not that she means to notice, but the blankets slip down his hips and she’s sort of relieved to see that he’s wearing sweatpants. 

It’s weird, where they fall now. She feels like they’ve regressed, or perhaps were barrelling too quickly forward before. Whatever, it’s not relevant anymore, there are more important things to worry about now.

“You wanna tell me what the fuck is happening?” he says, looking at her blankly.

“I have some theories.” She stands up from bed and crosses over to the bathroom door by the entrance of the room. “Get dressed.”

“We still going to the police?”

“Wouldn’t be much use in that now, would there?” Allie says, halfway inside the bathroom and poking her head out from the door frame. “We’re going to breakfast.”

Then she closes the door and gets in the shower, where she leans with her forehead pressed against the tile for a solid ten minutes, telling herself firmly that she can do this, she can act like she knows what the fuck she’s doing. Fake it til you make it, right?

All her life, she’s imagined what it would be like if Cassandra died. Fought and rallied against the idea, even in her own mind. Prayed at night to trade places with her. Had an awful time and gave herself mental whiplash reconciling her inner battle of wishing she could save her sister versus constantly living in her shadow.

In middle school, Allie watched some movie called _The Poseidon Adventure_ about a capsized cruise ship, where the characters are faced with a terrible choice that ultimately boils down to action vs. inaction and self-sacrifice for the greater good. Ever since, she’s always wondered who she would be if things ever got tough like that. She doesn’t have a very strong instinct for self-preservation, and she’s used to following orders, so she kind of thought she’d be one of the people waiting around to be told what to do, or otherwise doing nothing. She’s definitely not doing that now, though.

Anyway, she doesn’t know if the situations are exactly reflective of one another. What’s the parable there between a sunken cruise ship and a supernatural, world-bending magical spell, right? But she does know that her sister is out there somewhere, missing her, leaving her voicemails that never reach their destination. Asking to be found.

Allie’s sure she’s not going to be the hero in this story, but she’s certainly not going to sit idly by.

She blinks the hot water out of her eyes and steels her resolve. She’s going to go out there, get Harry up to speed and hopefully convince him that she hasn't completely lost her mind, and the two of them are going to get to the bottom of this. He’s stuck with her now, for better or for worse. 

  


**

  
Over breakfast, she slaps down the local newspaper in front of him that she’d snagged from the stand in the foyer of the diner, just because he’s still periodically checking his phone screen like he can’t quite believe it.

“In case you forgot how to read,” she says, tapping on the date printed under the main headline, something stupid about summer plans and the upcoming Memorial Day weekend. Harry stares at it hopelessly, then stretches his hand across the width of his forehead, thumb and forefinger on either side of his temples.

“How are you so calm about this?” he says, head tilted downwards and looking distressed.

“It just...weirdly makes sense, don’t you think?”

“It doesn’t. At all.”

Allie turns around in her chair, fishes in her backpack for her wallet and digs a quarter out of the coin pocket as their matronly waitress comes around and pours them each a fresh mug of coffee and sets their food down.

“Actually, could you make one of these a tea, please? So sorry to trouble you.” Harry gives a small, polite smile to the waitress, who is thoroughly charmed and says of course, she’ll be right back. Allie pauses, and Harry turns his smile to her, brow raised.

“You like tea, not coffee,” he shrugs, pulling her mug over to his side of the vinyl booth. “That, I do remember.”

Allie presses her lips together. Are they still doing this? It feels out of place.

“Here you go, dear,” the waitress says when she returns with a saucer and mug of hot water with a cheap tea bag steeped inside, lemon wedge on the side, and sets it down in front of Harry. “Anything else I can get you?”

“This is perfect, thank you so much,” he says, flashing his teeth at her. She nearly swoons on the spot, and Allie turns her head to the side so she doesn’t get caught rolling her eyes. When the waitress leaves, Harry pushes the tea over to Allie, deliberately brushing his hand against hers as he does so. She’s amazed at how even in the middle of all this, he still makes it a priority to flirt.

“Think she’ll write her number down on the bill for you?” Allie lifts the tea bag out of the mug and lets the excess run down the inside edge of the ceramic, keeping her gaze on the drink instead of on Harry.

He lets out a laugh. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Right. I’m sure you don’t know the effect you have on people. Women.”

He leans forward in his seat, looks up at her from beneath his lashes. “Yeah? And what effect is that?”

Allie hesitates. They’re probably going to have to address their thing some time or another, but right now there are more important matters to discuss. So she settles for rolling her eyes again and holding up the coin in front of him. “You wanna know what’s going on, right?”

“This one of your theories?”

She nods and holds the coin face up in her palm out to him. “Call it.”

He gives her a strange look. “What?”

“Heads or tails, Harry. Call it.”

He gives a half-scoff. But she knows he’s smart, he can connect the dots. She stares him down, brows raised expectantly, until he gives in. “Fine. Tails.”

She flips the coin up and catches it in the air in time to bring it against the back of her other hand with practiced ease. 

Cassandra had been so nervous about this part of the play, scared she was going to drop the coin or fail to catch it and ruin the pivotal scene. Allie’s hand-eye coordination had always been better, so Cassandra made them practice together countless nights in the living room, running through saying the dialogue while catching the coin at the same time. Their parents got so annoyed with the repetition that they were forced to take it to their bedrooms. It took ages before Cassandra was confident enough to do it perfectly every time, until she didn’t need Allie coaching her through it anymore.

Allie lifts her hand, hoping against hope that her theory is right, and exhales her relief when she sees that it is. “Heads. But let’s do best two out of three, shall we?”

Not giving Harry the chance to respond, she flips again. “Heads.”

And again. “Heads.”

And again, and again, and then several more times. It’s heads every time. Harry watches with a growing expression of unease, his eyes following the arc of the quarter as it spins upwards and is snatched out of the air by Allie’s hand.

“Getting a bit of a bore, isn’t it?” Harry says quietly, quoting his line from the play.

Allie finally stops flipping. “You remember what comes next? The monologue?”

“Kind of. That was Cassandra’s part.” He looks like he has an inkling of where this is going, through.

 _“One, probability is a factor which operates within natural forces. Two, probability is not operating as a factor. Three, we are now within un-, sub-, or supernatural forces,”_ Allie recites.

Harry looks impressed. “How do you remember all that?”

Allie shrugs, doesn’t make mention of how she knew all Cassandra’s lines, had them memorized along with all the cues so she could watch from the wings during rehearsals and performances in case anything went wrong. “Assistant stage manager, remember?”

His brow furrows just the slightest bit. “Yeah. You were always yelling at me to stand on my mark.”

She shouldn’t feel pleased that he can recall that, but she does. “Anyway, that’s so not the point,” she reminds him, waving the quarter in front of his face. “You get it now?”

“You think we’re working within un-, sub-, or supernatural forces,” Harry concludes, leaning back in his seat.

Allie quirks her lips. “Discuss. Not too heatedly.”

“Am I supposed to ask what’s the matter with you?”

“Well, listen. Ros and Guil, they’re extraneous characters in the background of something else larger at work, right?”

“And that’s what you think is going on here?”

Allie shrugs as if to say, _’isn’t it?’_

Harry doesn’t look entirely convinced. He moves forward in his seat, puts his elbows on the table and steeples his fingers together. “The point of that scene, though, is to show that their fates are sealed. The audience knows they die from the very beginning, and they can’t do anything about it because their destiny is out of their own hands. _Those_ are the supernatural forces at work. You saying that’s what’s happening to us?”

Allie bites her lip. She hadn’t thought about that. Damn, she forgot that Harry’s actually smart. “Explain the coin toss then,” she challenges, nodding to the quarter in the center of the table.

He tips his chin at the coin. “Do it again.”

She obliges, flipping the coin and catching it onto the back of her left hand. It’s heads. Harry nods, encouraging her to keep going. She does, and it lands on heads five more times before she finally lifts her hand on what must be the twentieth flip by now. 

“Tails,” she breathes.

Harry lets out the breath he’s been holding, gestures with his hands to her like he’s presenting his finding.

“But still, one of twenty-something? Not very likely odds,” Allie says.

“No,” Harry replies, holding up his index finger. “But still possible.”

She’s having a hard time wrapping her head around this now. Is Harry on board, or what?

“So wait. You believe me about the supernatural forces part, though?”

He chuckles. “I mean, how could I not? We’re living the same day again, and I’m pretty sure I saw you in my dreams last night. But not in the way you’d think.”

Ignoring his latter comment, Allie feels her mouth go a little slack. So it’s true—the shared dreams are a thing. They’d both seen the eclipse, and each other. She’s glad he’s the one who’s brought it up, because she’d been afraid to do so, although it amazes her that he can be so cavalier. Though she’s acting that way, too. Maybe this is how they cope—just act like it’s all casual and normal. Not some kind of magical fucking spell.

And the fact that he believes her—not because she’s convinced him, but because he’s come to the reasoning on his own and they have this shared conclusion. That’s significant, too.

“Okay, so. One out of twenty-something. What do you think that means?” she asks.

Harry pokes his tongue against the inside of his cheek, like he’s trying to find the right words to explain. “In the play,” he begins, “they just keep on flipping heads forever. Or until seventy-something before they give up. They don’t have the means to change the outcome, which is a direct metaphor for their fates of death.”

“Fantastic AP Lit essay,” Allie says, crossing her arms. “But you’re saying we _do_ have the means? To change the outcome?”

Harry looks down at the coin on the table, flips it over soundly onto the wood with a metallic _clink_ so that tails is facing up. “The twenty-something is everything else. The un-, sub-, and super shit. But there’s still the one. So yeah, I think we do.” He taps the tails-facing quarter twice with his index finger, and then leans back into the booth cushions. “But that’s assuming all this shit is running on your coin theory. Which it might not be.”

“Kind of seems like it is, though,” Allie says, finally picking up her toast from her plate and spreading a dollop of jam on top. She hadn’t had much of an appetite before, but now her stomach is rumbling.

“Maybe,” Harry concedes. “Anyway, this wasn’t what I was expecting when you mentioned you had theories, but I can’t say that I’m not impressed. This is some high concept stuff.”

“Well what did you think I was going to say? That they got abducted by aliens or some shit?”

Harry laughs. “Kind of? I guess it’s not an impossibility.”

“Well hey, newsflash, Bingham. I may not be Cassandra, but I am capable of coming up with things, too.”

"No," he says, circling his hands around his mug of coffee and looking at her curiously. "No, you're not. And that's a good thing. I like you better."

And that should piss Allie off, because she's always stood by her sister no matter what...except for how she's deliberately participating in this flirty Thing with the guy she knows her sister hates, but. Oh well. That feels irrelevant, right now. And maybe Harry doesn't know about the weird complex she has with all things Cassandra, which she's trying to grow out of, but the words still make her flush from the inside out, blooming across her cheeks.

"Okay," Harry says with a crooked smile. "No aliens. So what, then?"

She can't believe how easily the both of them have slid into this conspiracy theory belief. That they both agree some kind of outside, supernatural forces are at work and making everything go topsy turvy. She also can't believe they're talking about this so easily out in the open. It feels like they shouldn't be allowed; suddenly nervous, she glances around at the other patrons in the diner. There aren't many, it being a weekday and all, but there are still a good few of them, plus their middle aged waitress who keeps making doe eyes at Harry from across the service counter behind his back.

"Let's talk about it somewhere not here," Allie says, picking up her fork and cutting into her eggs, which have gone cold by now.

"Ah, can't let the civilians hear, can we?" Harry says, mirroring her with his fork.

She shrugs around a mouthful. "Just taking precautions. You never know." She also feels kind of badass and grown up, keeping their weird conspiracy under wraps, being suspicious of attentive strangers. "It's kind of like we're Mulder and Scully, doesn't it?"

"I thought you said it wasn't aliens?" Harry says. Then he smirks. "Though I'm not opposed to being the Mulder to your Scully."

Shit. She shouldn't have said that. Her cheeks heat up and she gives him a baleful look while preoccupies herself with stuffing eggs into her mouth in lieu of a response. He grins devilishly and crunches soundly into his toast. 

  


**

  
In the car, after she's done ribbing him about how the waitress had clearly been upset about Harry leaving ("Are you absolutely _sure_ , dear, you don't want any dessert? More coffee?"), they sit together in the parking lot of the diner, because they have no destination.

They can't go back to the inn; they had to sneak out in the morning because, technically, they didn't have the booking yet with the whole time reset, and Allie's seen _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban_ enough times to know that you're not supposed to interact with people who see your later timeline selves. Or something—she's not sure how this all is supposed to work yet, like if there will be two Allies and two Harrys at night when their past selves come driving in from Greenwich just before midnight.

"Jesus, I think she's looking out the window at us," Harry says, peeking into the rearview mirror back at the diner. Allie cranes her neck to look around; indeed their old waitress is stealing glances at Harry's car as she wipes down their booth by the window.

"What a heartbreaker," she coos at him as he puts the car into drive, probably just to get away from here. "You two would have been so cute together."

"Yeah, she's not really my type," he mutters, stealing a glance at Allie, who doesn't know what that's supposed to mean, because all the girls he's publicly dated before look nothing like her.

"She was coming on a little strong," Allie admits, jokingly. "I mean, who the fuck orders dessert with breakfast? What kind of question is that?"

Harry laughs, and they drive into the parking lot of an old strip mall a few blocks away from the high school.

"Okay," he says when he puts the car into park and unbuckles his seatbelt, turns his body so it's facing hers. "So, brainstorming."

She kind of loves how into this he is, lets a pleased smile cross her lips just briefly. Though the thought has entered her mind that he's this on board just because she's involved, and he clearly wants some kind of thing with her. "Okay, let's lay out all the facts we know, and then go from there. Right?"

"Sounds like a plan."

"Alright, so, one: everyone left for the trip last Monday, and other than some texts early on from the bus, we haven't heard from them since."

"Right."

"Two: our parents have somehow forgotten them, and they forget about us too if we're not physically in the room with them. Is that safe to say?"

Harry frowns, considering. She knows he and his mother don't seem to have the closest relationship, but Allie feels pretty confident on this one. It's what had been making her so uncomfortable in the first place, enough to want to escape from it all for a while.

"Yeah, I think so. My sister was acting that way, too, before we left."

"Good to know," Allie says, genuinely. That means whatever this is extends to all people they know, not just their parents or other adults. "Okay, three: we left town, and we forgot about them too. Until we came back, and then we remembered again."

"Four," Harry chips in, "today, which is the day they were supposed to have come back, is repeating itself. I have a feeling that this isn't going to be a one-time thing, either."

Allie nods in agreement. "Definitely not. I guess we'll have to wait and see, but I think it's bound to repeat again. And again, and again, until we do something that sticks."

"Twenty-something to one," Harry remarks.

“Twenty-something to one,” she echoes.

He says, “Okay, five. The dream. We saw each other. And we’re both having weird ones, although I don’t know what exactly yours are like.”

Allie chews on her thumbnail, running down their rudimentary list in her mind. "Let's save that for last," she says. "There's a lot to unpack there. Starting with point one...I don't think the others ever made it to their destination. Do you?"

Harry shakes his head. Okay, she's known this. It feels good to say out loud.

She continues, "Two and three, the forgetting. That assumes that something else is at play here, something that's fucking with our parents’ memories, and ours if we leave town. Which also means that the others going missing is deliberate."

Harry nods along, looking to be deep in thought. "What about four? This weird day-repeating thing?"

Allie thinks for a moment. "That one I'm not too sure about, yet. I think it's a sign that something's...wrong? I just don't know what or how, though."

"Okay, yeah," he says, furrowing his brow. "The dreams, then."

"Why don't you tell me what you saw in yours? And then we can compare and go from there. We obviously both saw the eclipse. Anything else?"

"Yeah," Harry says slowly. "Yeah. It was—weird. A bunch of flashes of scenes that looked like they were out of other people's lives. People we know, I mean. Kelly, Grizz, Luke, bunch of others. They were here, in West Ham. Only it was...different. Like—"

"Empty?" Allie fills in.

"Yeah, exactly. Except for the people on the field trip. People were partying in the church, or barricading themselves indoors, or looting the grocery store. And they were scared," he says, something in his face twitching, "they were scared and confused. I could feel it. That was in my first dream."

It sounds eerily similar to Allie's second dream, the one that had made her get out of bed and crawl into Harry's. "I saw some of that, too," she confides in him. "I also saw my sister, she was trying to call me and my parent's phone but it just kept going to voicemail. And I saw everyone gathered in the church, arguing about what to do. Things were getting pretty intense between Campbell and Cassandra. I think she wanted people to share houses, or something? I didn’t catch all of it."

"Okay, yeah. So what can we tell? You trying to say you think the others are at the place we saw in our dreams? The empty version of West Ham?"

Allie shrugs, as if to say _'basically, yeah.'_ "I mean, it's too much of a coincidence, don't you think? It has to be really happening out there somewhere. And the phone thing, they can’t reach us just like we can’t reach them."

“So somewhere out there—within reasonable driving distance between here and the Great Smoky Mountains, there’s an exact replica of our town, and the others are being held hostage there. Or something like that?”

“I...guess?” Allie says, worrying at the corner of her lip. “That’s one possibility. But it doesn’t explain our connection.” She gestures between the two of them. “How we’re able to see the place in our dreams.”

Harry has a concentrated look on his face, like he’s still piecing together the information and coming to a conclusion. Then a thought seems to strike him, because he suddenly digs his phone out of his pocket and opens up Google to rapidly type something in.

"What are you doing?" Allie asks him.

He gets his results back and turns the phone towards her, as if it'll answer her question. "Look," he says, zooming in on the calendar dates on the Wikipedia page. "There's not supposed to be another total solar eclipse in North America for _years._ ”

She stares at the screen, and then back at him, trying to process. "So you mean," she says slowly, "that they're not even in the country?"

Harry shakes his head, zooming out and then scrolling to show her a different list of dates, this time international. "There's no place on Earth that has had a solar eclipse in the past week and a half. Or one that will have one in the next couple months. The next one's in over a year, in Antarctica and the South Pacific."

Allie leans back in the car seat, stunned. "So they're not even on Earth."

Harry shrugs a little helplessly. He looks like he doesn't know what to do with this information.

"Okay," she says after a pause. "So they're not on Earth. And yet they're still in West Ham? How is that possible?"

He puts a hand up to his temple, shaking his head slightly. "Okay, this is gonna sound crazy, Pressman," he begins.

"Try me," she challenges. "I'm pretty conducive to crazy right now.

"How much do you know about parallel universes?"

Allie pauses. Almost nothing is the answer—she's never been too into the whole sci-fi/fantasy thing, no matter how hard Sam tried to get her to like it when they were younger. The most she's ever been able to do is Harry Potter, and even then it's just the movies, which Cassandra's been on her case about for years. But now that it's kind of her reality rather than pages in a book or something behind the screen, she's suddenly regretting not being more of a nerd.

"Not much," she admits, "but I get what you're saying. They're in some alternate reality?"

"Where everything's the same, except they're the only ones there," Harry finishes for her. "And my guess is that they were brought there on the buses. And left to their devices to figure shit out." He begins listing things off on each of his fingers. "I saw Kelly and Will counting up inventory in the grocery store. You said you saw Campbell and Cassandra fighting in the church over sharing shit. People were locking themselves indoors, scared and confused. Others were out partying. And," he continues, eyes darting around, like he's unsure about saying this part out loud, "I saw Grizz and Luke drive out to the edge of town. By the north exit and the southeastern one, over the bridge. Same one we took back from Greenwich. The roads...they just, like. Ended. Turned all into trees and wilderness and shit."

"...Shit,” Allie echoes, letting that sink in. “Total isolation. To cut them off and keep them confined to town."

Harry nods. It's a lot to take in, but...it makes sense to her. It fits, and more than that—it feels right. It feels true. She can't explain why it feels that way, it just does. She flicks her eyes over to Harry, who's looking more deeply troubled by the second, staring at the dashboard unblinkingly, as if his listed explanation has winded him somehow.

"So why the dreams, then? Why are we, specifically, having them? And why this weird intuition that we have? I mean, you feel that too, right?"

He flicks his eyes over at her, hair falling over his forehead. "You haven't figured that part out yet, Allie?" There's a hard edge to his voice.

She shakes her head. He doesn't look so good, going pale around the edges, but he licks his lips, leans in over the center console like he’s sharing a secret.

"It's because we're supposed to be there with them,” he says lowly. “The messed up timeline? The sign that something's wrong? It's us. We're the mistake."

For the first time since they started theorizing and having all these revelations, Allie suddenly feels afraid. For herself, and for Harry. Because she knows he's right about this too. The sense that she doesn't belong here, the wrongness of it all, the weight on her chest that keeps telling her to get out, leave town and never come back...this is why. And it scares the hell out of her.

It seems to scare Harry too, because he ducks his chin down, squeezes his eyes shut and presses his back into the leather car seating. His hands move to grip the steering wheel, maybe just for something to do since they're still in park. His knuckles start to go white.

"Harry?" Allie says, looking over uncertainly at him. She's never seen him this way before, and the change is sudden, startling. "Are you okay?"

He nods jerkily, though he looks anything but. Sweat has broken out at his temples and his breath is starting to come quickly, first just through his nose and then shaky through his mouth, then it seems like he can't breathe at all.

"Get—" he says haltingly, gesturing his arm wildly over to her side of the car. "The glove compartment—"

It clicks for her that he's having a panic attack the same second he opens his car door and turns his body around, planting his feet on the parking lot pavement below and leaning his head down close to his knees. She scrambles to open the glove compartment latch, cursing under her breath. Inside, there's nothing but the manual booklet for the car, his insurance and registration, an old iPod, some spare charging wires, and some crumpled up envelopes. But then she roots around some more and unearths an unused brown paper lunch bag, slightly bent around the edges but still folded up. Figuring this must be what he's after, she unfolds it and opens the door so she can get out and go around to his side of the car.

He's still sitting with his head down, his hands laced together and braced against the back of his neck now, taking in these halting, stuttering breaths that sound awful. She feels out of control, she doesn't know what else to do, so she crouches down so she can see his face a little better, offers up the paper bag to him.

He has his eyes screwed shut still, but he hears or maybe senses her there and snatches the bag, holds it up to his mouth, begins to hyperventilate into it. At a loss, and also unsure if this is allowed or not, Allie tentatively reaches out for his free hand, her heart aching for him. He grabs onto it like it’s a lifeline, squeezing tight, still breathing erratically into the brown paper bag. She watches as it expands and deflates, over and over, crinkling as cars pass by them in the parking lot. They must look crazy—Allie's sitting on the pavement now, holding Harry's hand as he gets through his attack.

"Is there—is there anything I can do?" she says, feeling helpless, keeping ahold of his hand in hers. This is entirely new territory for them—she's never known Harry to be anything but smooth and arrogant and charming and sometimes a little dorky. She tries her best not to feel awkward about seeing him so vulnerable and raw, realizing that he probably hates that she’s witnessing him like this. Allie has some experience with anxiety, sure, she's anxious about a lot of things. But she's never actually seen or experienced it manifested like this, Harry tucked in on himself, looking small and gasping for air.

His breath finally calms enough for him not to need the paper bag anymore, though he's still trembling and visibly trying to master his breath, chin ducked down to his chest so she can't properly see his face.

"Could you just—talk? About anything," he says between staccato breaths.

Allie casts wildly in her mind for something to talk about, something unrelated to—parallel universes and missing school kids and field trips and parents and anything that might not be a good topic right now.

"You know, I kissed you on a dare," is what she ends up blurting out, and she doesn't know how or want to examine why this is the subject she's landed on. "Back when I was eight. My cousin Sam dared me. I can't believe I forgot about it, because that was the one I actually really got in trouble for. Had to stop asking to be double-dog-dared all the time after that. Cassandra told my mom and she was not happy."

Harry gives a shaky breath that could be construed as amusement, so she continues, her hand still in his. He's loosened his death-grip somewhat, his fingers just pressing firmly against the outside ridge of her hand now, warm. "When I told you I broke my arm falling from a treehouse, that was a dare too. And I didn't fall, I jumped. You can thank Campbell for that idea, although I guess it's kind of my fault too since I listened. Cassandra cried more than I did, honestly. I don't think it even hurt that bad. Another time—and this really was the last time, had to make my last one ever be a big one, you know?—Becca dared me to pull the school fire alarm. I think it was in third grade?" She smiles at the memory, and then glances over at Harry to see how he's doing. He's mostly still now, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth in long drags. "But anyway, that one was a _triple_ -dog-dare, so it's not like I could just ignore it. And then we had to sit out on the soccer field for hours while the fire department searched the whole school."

Harry's finally stopped shaking and his breath is even and quiet, though he still hasn't let go of her hand. He lifts his head and looks at her incredulously. "That was you?"

Allie gives him a sheepish grin. "Yeah, I was kind of a bad egg."

"Wow," he says, shaking his head a little bit. He sounds impressed; she's glad, because that means the old Harry's starting to slide back into place. "I think I was right to have a massive crush on you, back then. Where'd that girl go?"

Well. The truth is that boisterous, daring part of Allie had sort of slunk into the shadows and disappeared once Cassandra's heart had literally broken, but she's trying to keep things light here. So she just smiles and gives Harry's hand a final squeeze before letting go and standing up.

His hand flexes by his side and when she drops it, and then he curls his fingers inward. She's not sure what that means. Actually, she's not supposed to have even noticed.

She leans against the passenger side door of the car parked next to them. Harry's still sitting sideways in the car seat, his elbows against his knees now, finally calm.

"Hey," he begins, and she already knows what he's going to say. "Uh. Sorry you had to see that—"

"It's fine, Harry," she says, cutting him off. "Really. It's okay."

He nods once. She's glad he's not being too awkward about it. "Thanks. I think it just...kind of hit me all at once, you know. All this shit."

"I get it," she says, and she means it. He doesn't have to explain himself to her. "I really do."

"Well, still, thanks. It, uh—means a lot. That you stayed," he says, rubbing the back of his head. She tries not to feel weird about watching him clam up while trying to express a genuine emotion.

"What was I gonna do, get out of the car and run off?" she jokes, and the look on his face makes her think that maybe others have done that to him before. Probably not literally, but it seems like her words hit a little too close to home. She pushes her foot forward, nudges the tip of her sneaker against his dumb Sperrys. "Besides, we're kind of like partners now. Solving this weird thing together. And that's what partners are for, right?"

Harry laughs, and she’s happy to hear the sound come out of his mouth. Some of the tension leaves her shoulders. "Still wanna be the Scully to this Mulder?"

She twists the corner of her lip upwards, kicks his foot lightly. "Wouldn't have it any other way. Partner."

He laughs again, softer this time. "Yeah. Partner." 

  


**

  
Harry hadn't given any real thought to returning home after coming back to West Ham. He thinks that’s justified though, given all of this morning's revelations.

It's well into afternoon by now, with all the time they spent talking and theorizing (and breaking down), as Allie nervously drives down to the corner of Maple so she can take the intersection that will lead them to Harry's gated neighborhood.

Back in the parking lot, she'd asked if he was good to drive and he'd given her the honest answer, since they’re on some kind of kick about being open with each other, which he's never really done before with a girl but. He likes it. With Allie, he likes it.

"You really trust me in this thing?" she'd asked him when she climbed into the driver's seat, spending some time adjusting the chair settings and the mirrors. Even though his insides had still been trembling with leftover anxiety, which he's learned by now how to hide pretty well, he'd managed to appreciate how hot she looked with her hands on the wheel of the Maserati. He'd told her that they needed to go back to his place because he—needed something. To take the edge off, he didn't say, but she'd understood immediately, which Harry honestly might adore her for.

It's clear that while she may have some practice driving under her belt, she's never handled anything like his car before, where the gas basically responds to the lightest of touches and the wheel might as well be liquid. He doesn't say anything about it though, just sits back in the seat and closes his eyes briefly.

It had all just come crashing down on him at once that moment, after he told her that they were the problem in the equation. Like he was paying the price for how cavalier and casual he'd acted while they were still in the diner. Just the thought alone—of alternate parallel universes existing at all, and the notion that one could become fucking trapped in one, and that someone or something was out there, doing this to them deliberately. The thought that had he not overslept last week or if Allie hadn't gotten sick, they'd be there, too. Or maybe if he hadn't overslept but she was still sick and then she’d be here in West Ham all alone, and vice versa. It was just too much, pressing in on his brain and his eyes and his lungs until he couldn't take it anymore.

Thinking back on it so soon certainly isn't helping, though. Harry can feel his heart start to squeeze in his chest, and he opens his eyes so he can be a little more grounded to reality, watch the town passing by through the tinted windows as Allie crawls along at a snail's pace.

"You can go faster, you know," he says to her, amused. She's got both hands on the wheel at a perfect ten and two and is sitting with her back ramrod straight. Any driver's ed teacher would be proud.

"We can't all go as fast as you, Bingham," she snaps at him, not taking her eyes off the road.

"Ain't that the truth," he mutters, more to himself than anything, but Allie hears and snickers. 

He likes that about her, that she just takes all the shit he says in stride. Takes all parts of him in stride, as a matter of fact. It's...new. He's never felt this way about another person before. In the general sense of all people, not just girls. Like, his parents included. The first time he ever had a panic attack, a few days before his father's wake, his mom caught him sitting crouched on the floor of the laundry room. She didn't say a word, just informed him in clipped tones the next day that she set up a therapy appointment for him. He’d gone to a couple, but then blew them off and she either hadn’t cared or hadn’t noticed. Harry’s not sure which is worse.

As he'd thought, no one's home when they pull up into the driveway. It's the middle of the day, Lucy's at school and his mom is at work. Allie looks around in wonder when he guides her in through the garage entrance, which leads them straight into the kitchen. It takes him a second to remember that she's never been to his house before, which feels odd because she might be the person he feels closest to in the whole world right now.

He tells her to wait there while he goes upstairs, then he pads up the curving staircase and swings a left into the master bedroom, where he's normally not allowed. But he knows it's where his mom keeps her various vices stashed, and he's dipped in enough times to get the drill now. She never notices anything is amiss. 

The orange bottle of Xanax is sitting right where it always is, up against all her makeup and shit in the vanity behind the bathroom mirror. Only when he pulls the bottle out, it jostles some of the objects in the cabinet and a couple things clatter into the sink.

Well, one thing really. A chain of condoms wrapped in black plastic packaging.

Harry stares at it for a while, bottle in one hand, feeling something strange and ugly twist in his gut. "What the fuck," he says under his breath to himself, and then he closes his eyes, because he still feels raw from earlier and can't take this right now. He quickly opens the bottle and shakes one pill out onto his hand, breaks it in half and swallows it dry. Normally he'd take the whole thing, but...God, he can still feel Allie's hand in his, her skin warm and sure and maybe that's enough for now to keep him grounded.

He re-caps the bottle and then, gingerly, with just his thumb and forefinger, folds up the condom packages and tucks them back into the mirrored cabinet behind the replaced prescription bottle. Jesus.

The Xanax is helping, though, because he doesn't feel as freaked out about it as he might have just a few minutes ago. Yes, it's still fucked up and he's more than a little upset, but he's not, like, having a meltdown. He doesn't need another brown lunch bag quite yet.

It's purely the thought of Allie waiting for him downstairs that forces him out of his position leaning against the bathroom sink. The other half of the pill tablet is in his pocket just in case, though he doesn't think he'll need it once he goes into the kitchen and catches her awkwardly gazing about like she doesn't know what to do with herself all alone, and then she gives him this smile after she sees him.

"You all good?" she asks, her eyes all wide and genuine.

"Yeah," Harry says. He has to consciously stop himself from doing some dumb shit like saying _'I am now,'_ and smiling at her.

It feels different, now. Being around her. Seeing her. Like, he still thinks she's hot, but it's not just that anymore. Not that that's _all_ it was before, but. It was a big part. Well, it's still a big part but there's another part there too, equally as big. Maybe even bigger. 

What the fuck is he even trying to say? He likes her. That much, he knows. But right now, _like_ seems too offhand of a word. But he’s pretty sure there’s no perfect word to describe that they are--partners discovering and trying to solve an interdimensional kidnapping case while simultaneously flirting with one another. Truth be told, Harry doesn't know what the hell he's doing anymore when it comes to Allie. He's just been...going with it.

"Alright, so what now?" she asks, propping herself up against the kitchen island. He gets a little distracted with the way her hair is falling over her shoulder, and she moves her head around to get his attention. "Harry?"

"I guess we just...keep thinking? Talking it out? Forgive me, it's my first time trying to unravel the mysteries of a parallel universe."

"You kinda made it seem like you were an expert back there," Allie says, sounding unimpressed. She doesn’t offer up a better alternative plan, though.

"I'm not," Harry admits. "But hey, it seems like we're not exactly pressed for time on this one."

"That's—” Allie considers, looking at the ceiling, “...true."

"So...can I get you a drink? Water? LaCroix? Beer?" He opens the fridge and gets out a passionfruit LaCroix for himself and cherry lime one for her. He's only joking about the beer, but it makes her roll her eyes, which is kind of what he'd been hoping for.

"I'll take one of those. How'd you know my flavor?"

"Lucky guess," Harry says, shrugging one shoulder. Doesn't mention how he'd seen her regularly get one from the vending machine before every play rehearsal. He doesn’t even know how he’d retained that information, but apparently he’s been more peripherally aware of her throughout the years than he’s realized.

The whole thing with his mom is the icing on this whole fucked up cake. Maybe if he can just stand here and watch Allie sip LaCroix in his kitchen, he can pretend none of it exists. But it's also weird cause he, like. Wants to tell her. Even though she doesn't know his mom and it's not her business and she has no reason to give a shit but—he thinks that she would. Give a shit. Which feels important, somehow.

"I, uh—when I was upstairs," he finds himself saying before he can think better of it. But he’s interrupted when the garage door off the kitchen is pushed open and Lucy comes bounding in, her backpack slung over one shoulder.

She immediately dumps it on the floor the moment she sees Harry though, and she squeals and launches herself at him.

"You're home!" she yells, and Harry finds himself with an armful of brunette waves and nine year old girl.

"Lucy," he says in surprise, obliging and lifting her off the ground momentarily. "What are you doing home?"

"What? School's over," she says, giggling as he sets her down. Harry looks over at the clock hung on the wall—Jesus, it's 3:30 already. Where the fuck has the time gone?

Then Lucy catches sight of Allie, who's hovering by the kitchen island and watching their exchange with her lips pressed together, and pokes Harry's side. "Who's that?" she asks bluntly. "I thought you said you were done bringing girls over."

Allie raises a brow at that, and Harry has the decency to feel abashed. "I...just meant Kelly," he says, a little bit to both of them, hoping that Allie doesn’t take it as a cop out. It’s the truth. Mostly. Then to Lucy: "Lucy, that's my friend Allie. Say hi to her."

"Hi," Lucy says.

"Hi Lucy," Allie replies. She's got this fond smile on and holds her hand out for Lucy to shake, which is funny in and of itself because one doesn’t normally shake hands with a nine year old. But Lucy takes it, and then instead of shaking it like some kind of business deal, Allie swings her arm around in a big, exaggerated circle, which makes Lucy break into another fit of giggles. "Nice to meet you."

"You're my brother's friend?"

Allie gives Harry a look. He just said it without thinking, really, but he realizes that it's pretty much true. Yeah, he kind of has a thing for her, but they also...get each other. Can talk to each other. They have fun with each other, too. He thinks about racing back to his car in the rain and stealing food from each other’s plates, talking through the walls and watching _Chopped_. Minus all the time he spends thinking about what she looks like naked, isn't that what friends are?

"Yeah," she says, sincerely to Lucy, "we're friends." Harry feels something unfurl somewhere in his chest.

"Good," Lucy says, pushing back into Harry's side. Because he can't help himself, he reaches down and pokes her in the cheeks, bothering her. Without blinking, Lucy pushes his hand away. "He needs friends. And I think I like you."

That startles a laugh out of Allie. "I like you, too.”

She’s good with kids, he notices, and she immediately talks to Lucy like she’s a normal person, unlike a lot of other people his age, which had always fucking anoyed him to no end. He thinks Lucy appreciates it too, because she’s smart and she can tell when she’s being infantilized.

"Is that all you've been doing?" Lucy says, turning back towards Harry and resting her chin against his ribs. "Have you been with Allie all this time? You keep going away. For ages and ages."

He and Allie exchange a significant look with one another, because while they have been gone for a few days, they know there's something else at play here too. "Yeah," Harry says, figuring the truth lines up enough to give to her right now. "We went to the beach house for a few days. Remember that place?"

"Kind of. Wish I could go too," Lucy pouts. He smiles and ruffles her hair.

"Next time, Lu, promise."

That brightens her up, and she pops off of Harry to grab her discarded backpack from the ground and heads back towards the garage door.

"You all set for tonight?" Harry asks. Really, he's asking her if she'll have someone to get her wherever she needs to go, if she'll be fed. She knows that's what it's code for and nods her head.

"Andrea's mom is getting me," she lists off for him, "then practice. Then dinner at Julia's. And then I'm sleeping over there too 'cause we have a bake sale tomorrow morning."

"Sounds good, kiddo. You got all your stuff?"

Lucy nods, patting her hefty backpack. “Just came back for my cleats.” She bends down and rummages through the closet that's next to the garage door and extracts a pair of muddy soccer cleats. From the driveway, there's a honk—her ride must be here. She gives both Harry and Allie a final wave before heading out the door.

"Catch you later, Lu," he calls to her as she's about to close the door, and she blows him a kiss, and then one for Allie, too.

"Wow," says Allie when she's gone. "She's really independent for her age, huh?"

"I guess," Harry replies. It's out of necessity, he knows. The thought of leaving her behind to go to New York in the fall has kind of been killing him. "She's always been that way, though. Better than I was."

"Baby Harry was clingy, huh?"

He laughs out loud at that and tries not to latch onto the concept Allie referring to him as _baby_ , even if she’d meant it in the literal sense. "I wasn't," he tells her, which is the truth. "I was just more...solitary. She's got a lot of friends." 

"Yeah, jeez, my parents kicked up a whole fuss about sleepovers. I wasn't allowed to go to one until middle school. And on a school night? Forget it."

"Yeah, can't say I've been to a 'sleepover' before either," he says, making air quotes with his fingers. Allie raises her eyebrows at him skeptically, and he laughs and shakes his head. "Not that kind of sleepover."

Although there haven’t been a ton of those “sleepovers,” either, despite what Allie might think of him. But he’s not about to tell her that.

"Wait, what if there's an emergency? Shouldn't you have asked Lucy for a number you could reach or something? Her friend's mom?"

"Ah, Julia's mom," Harry says slyly, picking up his seltzer can. He wonders if he should be telling her this. "It's cool, I have her number already."

Allie's eyebrows shoot up. "Oh?"

He shrugs, feigning nonchalance while watching for her reaction. "She may have slipped it to me after I picked Lucy up from some birthday party a few months ago."

Amazingly, Allie laughs, the sound high and amused. "What the fuck?"

"Right?" And then Harry's laughing too. When it happened, Kelly had gotten so upset. And not to rag on her, but he'd been pretty fucking annoyed about that because he'd thought it was hilarious at first, but then she'd not been happy which in turn pissed him off because, like, did she really think he was going to hit on his little sister's best friend's divorced mom? The only reason he'd even put the number in his phone was for emergency purposes because Lucy _was_ actually at Julia's house all the time. He lied and told Kelly he deleted it when she asked, and then they agreed to drop it, even though Harry was privately still annoyed.

"Please don't tell me you've called," Allie says, but there's a glint in her eye that lets him know she's joking. Harry leans an elbow on the countertop, enjoying how Allie can see the absurdity in it.

"Oh, yeah, we've had a bunch of crazy phone sex. Did I not tell you that?"

"Hmm. She sounds freaky. Maybe we could both give her a call," she muses, and then sips her LaCroix. Harry tries not to look at her like she's fucking crazy, but she might actually be. Or maybe she's just driving him crazy. The thought she's just put into his head is hot and weird as fuck and incredibly confusing all at once, and he thinks it might be time for a subject change. 

  


**

  
As is becoming a trend for them, they order shitty junk food delivery because even though it's late afternoon, neither of them have eaten since breakfast that morning. Harry takes the safety cover off the pool while Allie tips the driver, and they roll up their pants and dip their feet into the water as they fight over who gets the last of the stale french fries. Allie wins, obviously, and he splashes some water up her leg for retribution, which of course gets him sprayed in return, all the way up his front. Not soaked, but enough for certain parts of his shirt to stick, uncomfortable and cold, to his skin. He doesn't mind, though, because the devious and alive look on her face when she does it is worth it.

Because it's now an appropriate time, he does bring back two beers for them both after he throws their trash away in the kitchen, and she clinks her bottle against his before taking a swig.

"You got all that Claw for the beach house and then left it there," she comments, playing with the condensation dripping down the sides of her bottle.

"It was a necessary sacrifice," Harry says solemnly, taking another drink. She huffs in amusement and pushes her shoulder against his.

He still wants to tell her about his mom and what he discovered. They're supposed to be talking about the other universe and all the others trapped there, but so far all they've done is bicker over fries and see who could make the longest cheese string with their mozzarella sticks. But it's weighing heavily on his mind, hovering in the back over every moment, especially now because they're at his house, a place so rife with memories of both of his parents.

Harry doesn't know what he's looking for from her, exactly, when he tells her about it. Just knows that he wants to share what's on his mind with her. And it's unexpectedly simple, she gets all serious right away and listens to him attentively and the words come a lot easier than he ever thought they would, easier than they did with Kelly, with the therapist, with anyone else. 

He finds himself elaborating, telling her about his dad, too. How he used to be Harry’s favorite person when he was little, until it was obvious that his father’s attention was short-lived, easily stolen away by other things. Drinks, women, sailing, whatever. Karen Bingham didn’t seem to give a shit, and then Harry stopped giving a shit too because when you’re young you emulate your caretakers, even subconsciously, and their whole family carried on not giving a shit about one another until his dad went and wrapped his car around a tree, blood alcohol level off the charts in the toxicology report.

"And now...I mean, he hasn't even been dead six months. And she's fucking someone else already," he finishes, sounding bitter even to his own ears, his hands braced on either side of the edge of the pool. He guesses that's how he feels about it. Bitter. Not like he has some sense of a huge betrayal, but it's just...confirmation of what he'd already known about his mother and how she felt. About them all, really. He's more disappointed at himself for feeling disappointed at all.

"Harry..." Allie says, tilting her head and looking at him sincerely. God, those eyes—it's almost unbearable to have those eyes on him right now. It's unbearable to think that she actually cares when, in reality, they barely know each other, have spent just a scant few days with each other, but...then her hand is reaching out for his, her palm resting on top of his knuckles, wet and cold from holding onto her beer bottle, but comforting nonetheless. "I don't know what to say," she tells him honestly, "except that's awful. And you don't deserve that. You and Lucy both."

"Thanks," he says, already feeling lighter just for having gotten it off his chest. She seems to intrinsically know that he’s not looking for advice or anything, but rather someone to listen to him and make him feel heard. She gives him that.

He turns his head, looks at her out of the corner of his eye. Around them, the sun is beginning to set, painting the sky and the world in a pale orange glow. It suits Allie's palette exceptionally well; everything about her looks soft right now, down to the curve of her ear, the point of her chin, the golden wisps of her hair, haloed around her head in the waning light, the ever-shifting water from the pool reflecting all across her skin. 

She looks away from him, leans back on her other arm and tilts her head up towards the sky, though the hand resting on his doesn't move. "I wish I'd known you before all this," she confesses without looking at him, her thumb bushing against the outside edge of his wrist bone once, twice.

"Me too.” And he means it, desperately so. He wishes he had her in his life this way six months ago, a year ago, nine years ago, beyond a spontaneously stolen kiss during recess, beyond her scolding him for not standing on his mark during play rehearsals. "I mean...it's insane to think about."

He has a hard time remembering exactly how many days it's been since they left for Greenwich and kickstarted this whole thing, although maybe their convenience store encounter could technically be counted as the beginning of it all. It’s certainly the beginning for him, in terms of how long he’s had Allie Pressman on his mind.

"Part of me still feels like I invented all of this, like it’s all in my imagination," Allie says to him. "Like...I spent so much time when I was younger thinking of these scenarios in which I had to save Cassandra, or like, trade places with her. And then finally people would pay attention to me. But then my sister would be saved, too, so it was like a win-win. Which is fucked up, but whatever. And now it's like...that's actually happening. Except I don't want the attention. I just want my sister back."

"Yeah," Harry says, trying to empathize. He knows he'd be moving heaven and earth right now if Lucy were stuck in some kind of similar scenario, but then again, Lucy's a little girl, and not a fully grown, competent, fucking annoying woman. Then he catches on to something Allie had said, and tilts his head questioningly. "What do you mean 'she would be saved'?"

Allie takes a deep breath, also takes her hand off of his. Immediately, the evening air makes it cold, goosebumps breaking out where her palm had been. "How do I say this?" she asks with a sardonic twist of her lips. "After you've spent the last few years being a total asshole to her?"

Harry puts both of his hands up placatingly. "Hey, I was just doing my thing, okay? She didn't have to get so pissed about trying to control everything."

"She does like the control," Allie muses, and this feels incredibly vindicating to hear, because it validates what he'd been thinking all this time, shows him that Allie thinks it too, about Cassandra. Probably not to the same degree he does, but whatever. "She likes it cause she doesn't have it in other places in life. Like her dumb heart, for one."

He senses that there's more to be told there, so he doesn't say anything and waits for her to continue.

"I was ten, Cassandra was eleven," she says. Harry has a feeling this isn't a story she's told many times. "We were staying with our grandparent one weekend over the summer, they took us to the park and we were just...on the swings. Or at least I was, because one second I was looking up at the sky, and the next she was just—on the ground. I thought she was dead. She wasn't waking up, and it was—terrifying." She pauses, and he sees her reliving the memory through her expression. "But anyway, an ambulance was called, hospital, tons of tests and doctors appointments. Surgery, too. More than one. Turns out she had a heart defect, from birth. _Has_ a heart defect. But ever since then it's never really been the same. I mean, most of the time she's fine, but when she's not fine she's...really not fine."

Harry, for once, doesn't know what to say. He thinks back on all the times he's interacted with Cassandra, none of them particularly remarkable except for how annoying he'd always found her. He never would have guessed there'd been something like this going on with her. Finally, he says, "...Is that why she was always leaving class randomly?"

Allie gives a small laugh. "You noticed that? Yeah, standing doctor's appointments. All the teachers knew."

"I honestly thought it was because she had some kind of independent study deal. Or because she already knew whatever the fuck we were learning and the teachers just didn't give a shit 'cause they knew she did too."

It does make him feel a little bit guilty for being an asshole to Cassandra over the years, but mostly it just makes him feel for Allie. The two of them—Allie and Cassandra—are no longer really connected in his mind the way he supposes they are in other people's. Allie is Allie, Cassandra is Cassandra. What he thinks of one doesn't really have any bearing on the other. But it must not have been that way for her, Allie, all this time. He can see how it's confusing, creates a complex, a shadow, but he can also see that Allie loves her sister. And that's something he can understand.

"Anyway, control. She liked to have it over the things that she could. I bet she's over there right now, leading all the others. Saving them from their stupid selves," Allie says, gazing into the distance.

"No doubt I'd be one of the assholes opposing her if we were there," he replies, elbowing her gently. She smiles at him and elbows him back.

"And you know I'd be a hundred percent behind her, right?"

"Yeah?" Harry says, raising his eyebrow. "And we'd be, what, enemies?"

Allie ducks her head down, shakes it, the curve of her cheek letting him know she's still smiling. "I don't know. I think we'd just have to get to know each other. Understand one another, like we do now."

"Oh, we do now, do we?"

"I mean," Allie shrugs, looking at him half playful, half serious. "Yeah. I think we know each other pretty well."

It's dark around them now, the sun having fully set sometime while Allie had been talking. The backyard is quiet, the water cool on his feet and lapping up his shins, their empty beer bottles sat on either side of them. He looks at her in the blue glow, reflected up from the underwater lights installed in the pool tiles, and then he finally leans in to do what he's been wanting to do ever since he laid eyes on her that day at the drugstore.

She tastes like beer and her lips aren't as soft as he imagined they would be, probably because she scrapes her teeth over them when she's anxious, he's noticed, but it doesn't matter. Nothing matters, except for the fact that she's kissing him back.

When he pulls away, he feels uncharacteristically bashful about it, ducks his head down and hides the smile spreading across his face. She's got a peculiar expression, like she can't make him out, and then she looks up at the sky in order to suppress what is, undeniably, a pleased look. He commits that look to memory, then and there.

"What was that?" she asks around a barely concealed smile.

"I just...you're right. I feel like I know you, now."

Which is how he'd known that she wanted him to do it. Her eyes had flicked down to his lips for just a fraction of a second when he'd looked over at her, and he just knew. Not that he ever thought otherwise—they were about to that night on the beach, anyway. He's probably thought about kissing her a thousand times now, but just then, the moment had been right. And she'd wanted it.

Allie leans in first this time, bringing her hands up along his jaw, letting her fingers slide into his hair and against his scalp, letting her mouth open as he puts a hand at her waist. Her foot finds his in the pool water and she links their ankles together the same moment she slides her tongue against his. He thinks he loses all higher function after that.

When she breaks away, she rests her forehead against his, eyes still closed, one hand still cradled around the back of his head, and Harry's paralyzed by how much he wants her.

She opens her eyes and looks at him with intention. "We should go inside," she whispers, and he can feel each syllable in her breath against his face. He knows exactly what she's saying, wants to ask if she's sure, but then she's linking their hands together again and pulling them up, the water sloshing as they extract their pruney toes from the pool.

They don't bother drying their feet when they go back inside, leaving a wet, chlorine-scented trail all across the kitchen tiles and up the hardwood stairs and into Harry's bedroom, where she pulls him in towards her again, their hands still linked, and kisses him sweetly.

After some minutes, he feels the need to stop her, because she's got her hands under his shirt now and her sweater's slipping down one shoulder and she's started pressing them closer together, her hips against his and, God, he wants this, wants _her_ , he really does, but—

"Allie," he says against her lips. She hums, running her hands along his back. "Allie," tries again, and then pushes her back by the shoulder, just slightly.

"What's wrong?" she asks. Jesus, she's breathless and there's color high on her cheeks. Maybe he's not strong enough for this.

He shakes his head. "Nothing. Nothing, I just. I...feel like I have to let you know."

She raises her eyebrows. "Is this the part where you tell me about some weird body part? Because it's okay, Harry, really."

He gives a harsh laugh, only because she probably _would_ be okay with it if he did have some weird body part (though he mentally scoffs at the idea, because, well, he's Harry Bingham). "No," he says, "no, I'm trying to say that. This isn't, like...like yeah, I've been lowkey trying to get into your pants this whole time, I admit it, but this isn't like that. This is—," he tries to search for the words, but can only come up with one, "—different. I _feel_ different now. About you."

And God, he hopes it's the same for her, he wants it so badly. Because she'd seemed like she was down, before, when they flirted in the coffee shop and then all throughout Greenwich, but this, now, in light of all they've discovered, all they've shared with each other...it's no longer like that. Casual, he realizes. It's no longer casual between them.

"Harry..." She laughs a little, pulls herself against him fully and loops her arms around his neck, looking into his face. Her eyes are soft and understanding and he feels so full of emotion that it's a little incongruous, considering what they're about to do. Or maybe it's not—maybe this is what it's all about. He wouldn't know, has never done it like this before. "It's different for me too," she says, and then she pushes him backwards until he falls onto the bed, climbs on top of him and kisses him again, and he doesn't hesitate about getting his hands on her bare skin anymore.

Afterwards, when she's just finished catching her breath and Harry's trying will his sheets into swallowing him whole, she flips over, lays her arms across his chest, rests her chin on her wrists, and presses her naked body all along his side, legs tangling with his under the covers.

"It's okay," she tells him soothingly, brushing his sweaty hair away from his forehead. "You made up for it in the end."

That's true. Plus he'd gotten to see what she looks like when she comes, which had been wholly rewarding. He hums, playing with the curly tips of her hair, simultaneously, and a bit childishly, wishing that he could have been better for her. But it had just been so _much_ , having her under him, her voice breathy and rough in his ear, encouraging him, the pure feeling of her around him, warm and wet...he hadn't stood a chance.

She adds, "And there's always next time," and then drops a kiss onto his collarbone. That alone is enough to stir him a little bit, but then Allie extracts herself from him and gets out of bed to use his bathroom to clean up and to pee, mentioning something about advice from her sister along the way. Harry's not super paying attention; he's distracted by the view.

Before she gets back into bed, she rummages around his drawers without invitation, but Harry doesn't mind because, again, the view is incredible. She extracts one of his plain gray t-shirts and slips it on before nestling herself next to him, fitting herself into the curve of his arm, not seeming to care at all about how he's still slightly sweaty.

"I know we kind of let today slip after the morning," she says, huddled up against him, her hair tickling the underside of his chin, "but tomorrow we gotta get back on it. Solving the case."

"Course," he says automatically. He'll do just about anything she might ask right now.

"Wonder what we'll dream about tonight," she murmurs, running her foot up and down his calf. Harry lets out a bemused huff.

"Jesus, yeah. I almost forgot about that." He thinks that's understandable, though. He's been preoccupied for the last few moments.

She turns in his arms so she's laying on her side, facing him. "Whatever it is," she says quietly, "I just hope they're okay."

Instead of replying, he presses a kiss to her forehead, then to her hair, strokes his hand up and down the nape of her neck. The stakes are higher for her, he understands that. But he feels it too, the pull towards this thing, the need they have to solve it and right the world from its off-center axis. And perhaps it's all the fucking feelings he suddenly has now, but Harry can't help but think that he and Allie together could do just about anything.

He does indeed dream, as does she.

Maybe their proximity to one another has something to do with it, because when he drops off into sleep, Allie's still in his arms, and then she's there in his dreams too, too, seeing every flash of the other world just like him. He doesn't try to talk to her, knows without having to be told that he can't speak, anyway. Can't really move around all that much, either, or do anything that has any real effect on what he's seeing.

This time, it's a much stranger collection of scenes. Before, they all had a looming, ominous feeling about them, interspersed with moments that could be straight from the real world, like the partying, the people gathered on the green, or in the cafeteria. 

This time, the flashes are downright scary.

Pouring rain outside the local hardware store, people fighting in the streets and all along the sidewalks, glass shattering as the neighboring businesses were broken into with abandon. The deafening roar of combustion, a plume of blazing fire and acrid smoke rising high into the air as a car burns from the inside out.

Luke struggling to carry a girl Harry recognizes as someone who he took French with in seventh grade, clearly dead, as a sea of people part to make way for him along the aisle, her body laid out on the offering table, gray and lifeless. Clark and Jason complaining about the blisters sprouting on their hands as they dig a grave for her in the plot of grass behind the church.

A crowd in the same church, arguing while Harry and Allie watch. Proving Allie's theory right, Cassandra attempts to step up and direct people to share resources, share houses, to the consternation of several. Campbell emerging from the wings and aiming a revolver directly at Cassandra's forehead, her pressing viciously against it and saying, _"Fucking shoot me."_ Allie looking at the scene, then at him, with terror in their eyes as they're whisked away before the trigger is or isn't pulled.

Then, a single scene of quiet. They're on the streets again, which are lined and piled high with bursting garbage bags, around dawn, judging by the light. Only they're not alone—Harry can feel it. Someone or something else here, among them, aware of them. He turns to Allie, unable to speak, unable to pick up his feet to investigate. She looks wary and confused, like him.

Then, from the hedges, a dog—a black and white border collie that looks all too familiar—emerging, sniffing around the garbage piles for a bit before pausing. Its ears prick and it picks its head up, alert. It turns its head and stares straight on at Harry and Allie, keeps on staring while they stare back, frozen in place. Then it swishes its tail a few times and goes bounding off into the other side of the hedge.

For reasons he can't explain, what Harry wants to do more than anything is follow the dog. But he can't move, and then it's gone.

Next to him, Allie grabs his hand tight, which he hadn't known was possible or allowed here in their dreams, in the other world. But it works all the same; her hand is warm and sure and everything he needs right now.

After that, though, the dream ends, and Harry's mind slips into blissful, unconscious ignorance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah man i don't know! the plot may or may not have found me
> 
> [tumblr](http://dystopians.tumblr.com/)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In all this—the uncertainty, the fear, the thousands of questions and worries filtering in and out of her mind as they deal with the quandary of time loops and multiple realities, Harry’s the only thing she feels sure of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was _supposed_ to be the last chapter. i was _supposed_ to wrap things up. i did not :/
> 
> featuring: actual case fic this time, Case Fic Tropes, bad governance, lots of sneaking.

She’s not particularly shocked that it’s Wednesday again when she wakes up.

Allie looks blearily at her phone, fished from somewhere in the sea of blankets in Harry’s bed, and doesn’t bother clicking through the same apps she had yesterday. Or...the last time it was morning, at least. “Yesterday” is kind of a fuzzy concept right now.

He’s still asleep, so she takes the opportunity to study him for a while. She remembers doing the same back at the beach house that morning after she crawled into bed with him, only this time she’s free to reach out and trace the freckles dotting his face, by the corner of his lip, smooth her finger along his brow bone, push the lock of hair falling into his closed eyes away from his forehead.

His breathing changes subtly, and she knows he’s awake. “Having fun?” he mumbles, eyes still shut, lashes fanned out along the thin skin of his undereye, as she continues to trace his features. 

“I wanted to do this the other day,” she says, arm pillowed under her head.

He smiles and cracks an eye open to peer at her. “Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. We weren’t there yet, I guess. I didn’t know if I was allowed.”

“I would have allowed it.”

She rolls her eyes fondly. “Well yeah, I get that _now_.”

She’s reluctant to get up. Because once she does, they’ll be forced to face the reality of their situation. Several developments from last night’s dreams make her sick to her stomach when she thinks about them, including the idea that though all of them seem to have crossed over into the other world safely, there’s still the possibility that while over there, they might actually hurt one another. That they themselves are more of a threat than whomever or whatever’s doing this to them. Campbell with the gun to Cassandra’s head for one, Jesus Christ—Allie wanted nothing more, as she witnessed it, to put herself in between the barrel of the weapon and her sister. But she couldn’t move, other than to turn her head and look at Harry. 

And then there’s _dog_ , what the fuck is that all about? It’s obviously the same as the one that had run out on the road in front of them the night they came back to West Ham from Greenwich. 

The thoughts enter her mind and ruin the blissful little bubble built around her and Harry here between the warm sheets, so Allie sighs, takes her hand off of Harry’s face and gets out of bed. He seems to get it, doesn’t make a comment as she picks up her discarded clothes from last night from the floor to pull them back on. All her other shit is still packed away in her duffel in the trunk of Harry’s car.

“We have work to do, don’t we?” Harry says from the bed. Allie turns to look over her shoulder at him, her clothes gathered in her arms. He’s sitting upright against the headboard, bare-chested and sleepy, and her heart gives a little squeeze. But—no, they’ve already wasted enough time. And she let herself have last night. They can’t afford any more distractions, the stakes are too high.

“Yeah,” she answers. “We sure do.” 

They have a vague plan of action today to go to the school and try to dig up whatever they can, maybe question some teachers out of those who are still around, sneak around administration a bit. As much as they postulated yesterday, there’s still a ton of fact-finding to be done, still so much that they don’t know. Harry had been reluctant at the idea at first, unsure about drawing attention to themselves, but Allie had put her foot down. They _have_ to do something, and now. And if Harry really doesn’t want to go then she’ll go on without him.

He hadn’t seemed happy with that idea, said he’d follow along with whatever she wanted to do, and then pulled her in for a kiss. Allie smiled against his lips before pushing him away so they could finish getting ready.

Harry, apparently, has stopped holding back on touching Allie whenever he feels like it. It’s not sexual or anything either, an absentminded pat on her head as she passes him to grab her phone from the sheets, a hand on the small of her back steadying her as she pulls on her shoes, a nudge of his shoulder as they exit the bedroom door. She doesn’t mind at all, actually kind of likes Harry subconsciously seeking out the physical contact.

As they’re ambling down the stairs, he decides to run his hands along the inside hem of her shirt and pinch playfully at her hips while telling her he’ll get some coffee and tea going. She giggles, ticklish at the spot he’s touching, and slaps his hands away when they reach the landing.

There’s a shuffling sort of noise that comes from the hallway off the main foyer, followed by a stern-sounding voice.

“Harry? Is that you?”

It’s undoubtedly Karen Bingham, even though Allie’s never quite met the woman before. Harry curses under his breath, immediately extracting his hands from Allie’s waist, even though Karen is in her study and can’t see them.

“I didn’t know she’d be home,” he mutters, running a distressed hand through his hair.

“Go talk to her,” Allie urges him. “It’s not like you’ve done anything wrong.”

Harry nods like she’s had a good idea, though it’s true. They’ve done nothing suspicious yet, and this is Harry’s own house, for God’s sake, even though his eyes are shifting around all nervously. Reluctantly, he parts from Allie’s side and goes over to the open French doors leading into his mother’s office.

“Hey, mom,” he says, leaning against the frame while Allie hovers somewhere at the staircase banister post, her thumbnail between her teeth. She doesn’t know why she’s so nervous, other than the fact that the picture Harry’s painted for her of his mother isn’t a very nice one.

“Glad to see you up so early.” And then, sounding a little too perceptive, Allie hears Karen ask, “And who’s there with you?”

Harry glances over at her and, after a beat, gestures with his head for her to come over. No use in pretending otherwise, it seems. Allie does so hesitantly, trying not to bite at the corner of her lip or fidget with her hands as she appears in the doorway. Karen is sitting at her desk, her blonde hair twisted into a smart updo, silky blouse and crystal earrings perfectly in place, papers scattered all over her desk, a pen in her hand still hovering over some documents. She and Harry look almost nothing alike. 

“This is Allie,” Harry introduces. Karen puts her pen down and assesses Allie, who tries to smile. She’s never had a problem with adults liking her before, but this...

“Allie Pressman,” Karen says. “Your mother and I have crossed paths a few times, yes. I didn’t realize you were Harry’s age.”

“I’m a grade below,” she supplies, though it makes her feel a little stupid to point that out. What does it matter? She’d also forgotten that their parents know each other, although West Ham is small enough for that to generally be true of all the adults. Now that she thinks about it—her mom is an auditor and has done some work for the city before, and Harry’s mom is the city attorney...but it doesn’t sound like, from Karen’s clipped tones, they had a great experience with each other.

“Ah,” Karen says blandly, then raises an arched brow and appraises them together. Allie’s suddenly aware of her proximity to Harry, their arms brushing, her automatically going to stand close to him after he called her over. Karen doesn’t seem to care that it’s obvious Allie had spent the night last night, which makes her think that maybe this isn’t the first time she’s caught a girl sneaking downstairs with Harry the morning after. Even though they weren’t really sneaking. “And you’ve found this son of mine to be good company?”

The words remind her of something her mom might say, only Karen’s tone is absent of the joking, lighthearted quality. She asks it like she’s serious.

“We’re friends,” she answers simply. Karen looks like she doesn’t know what to make of Allie and honestly, Allie feels the same.

“I see. Well, Harry,” she says, turning her gaze back towards her son, “I won’t be home until late tonight. I’ve got a city meeting, you know, business as usual.” At those words, Harry suddenly stiffens next to her, just minutely, but she’s close enough that she can sense the tensing of his shoulders. He stuffs his hands into his pockets, maybe to keep from visibly clenching them. “Lucy’s all planned out. You two can entertain yourselves for the day, I’m sure?”

She looks like she knows exactly what she and Harry might do to “entertain themselves,” and like she doesn’t care either way. Allie thinks she gets what Harry had been saying about them all not giving a shit about one another, minus Lucy.

“Sounds good,” Harry says, and then turns away abruptly with his hands still in his pockets to head back down the hallway. Karen doesn’t spare either of them another glance before going back to her paperwork.

He looks anxious, and instead of going for the coffee machine when they reach the kitchen, he guides her by the elbow to the sliding door that leads out to the pool, now covered once again, presumably so they can talk outside.

“We’ve forgotten a huge fucking detail,” he says urgently to her once they’re outdoors.

“What?” He’s jittery all of a sudden, animated, reminding her of how he’d been in the diner and the car when they were making all their wild revelations. 

“The smell,” he says simply. 

Allie feels herself go still—that’s right. How had she forgotten? It’s all the cast and crew could talk about the night of the play, when it had mysteriously appeared and cast a rot over the air. She’s not sure when exactly it had faded, but it was definitely gone by the morning the others left for the field trip. And now Harry’s saying it connects to their current situation?

“What about it?” she asks, thinking Harry might have more of an inkling than she does.

“Before we left for Greenwich,” he tells her, his voice low like it’s a secret he doesn’t want anyone else overhearing. “I was talking to my mom and I mentioned it to her, how whatever they did at city hall worked in getting rid of it. And she didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. And then all our other shit happened, so I forgot about it ‘til just now.”

Allie furrows her brows. “What? But they called an emergency meeting for it like, the next morning. Even my parents went.”

“I know,” Harry says. “I went to her office that day too to ask her something, but she couldn’t even stop to talk. And now she doesn’t remember?”

Right. Weird loss of memory is definitely. symptom of the supernatural. “So...it’s definitely connected, then,” Allie concludes. “To the rest of all this stuff.”

“Apparently.”

“How is this somehow getting bigger?” she asks, putting a distressed hand up to her forehead. “The smell was such a thing it happened the _first_ time and I don’t know what the fuck they did to make it go away then, but that means that our situation with the others...it all starts back then, too.”

“And it’s not just about us,” Harry elaborates, his voice still carrying a tone of urgency. “It’s our parents, too. They’re involved, somehow. City hall, the leadership. They’ve gotta be.”

“A literal conspiracy,” says Allie. “How high up the chain do you think this goes?”

Harry’s starting to look uneasy again, like he had when she’d brought up visiting the school to poke around. Wanting to nip this in the bud, she grabs him by his elbows firmly, forces him to look into her face. “Harry. This is _good_. We’re figuring out more and more by the hour.” 

“How is this _good?_

But the last thing she wants is for Harry to go into another panic, so she takes his face in her hands and makes him look into her eyes, really look. “Harry,” she says again, slowly. “We’re partners, remember? And we can do this. We’ve got this.”

Maybe if she says it enough, maybe if she really believes in it, it’ll be true.

He looks calmer when she releases him and runs a hand through his hair, huffing out a long exhale.

Allie licks her lips, trying to formulate a new plan. She throws one together quickly, deciding then and there that if they’re going to do this, they really need to _do_ this, full-out. “Okay,” she begins, clasping her hands together in front of her body. “Okay, our first point of order doesn’t have to change. We should still go to the school and find out as much as we can there. And then,” she takes breath before continuing, “we may or may not have to break into city hall.”

“...Excuse me?”

“Think about it,” she says, starting to pace across the pavement. “Town leadership is definitely involved in this somehow. Your mom’s the city attorney, mine’s an auditor, and let’s not forget about my uncle, the mayor. He was at the helm of the entire smell thing the first time, took all the credit for it, remember? My mom was super pissed about it. I’m willing to bet he’s involved this time, too.”

Harry doesn’t say anything, so she continues, “And then, after however long all that takes, we need to find the dog.”

“Shit, yeah,” Harry says, scrubbing a hand across his forehead. “The dog. God, there’s so much to keep track of.”

“You wanna get out a whiteboard, or something? Some red string? Complete the look,” Allie jokes, hoping that the levity will help. It does; Harry chuckles.

“Honestly, it might actually help,” he says. He’s definitely not wrong, but the practicalities of it just don’t work out, and they have places to be, secrets to uncover. “So how the fuck are we supposed to break into city hall?”

“Maybe that was an exaggeration,” Allie relents, glad that he’s on board. She’ll go alone if she has to, but she really wants Harry there by her side. “I mean, we both have family that works there. I think we should be able to just...walk in.”

“And look into confidential records and shit? Yeah, that’s not gonna fly. They’re super uptight whenever I visit.”

“Okay, so we’ll go, snag some keys, and go back at night after everyone’s gone. This is West Ham, crime rates aren’t exactly through the roof here, you know? It’s not like the place’ll be guarded,” Allie improvises.

“That...could work,” Harry says, considering. “My mom has a spare set of keys for home and work that she keeps in her drawer. We could get those after she leaves, save us the trip.”

“Perfect. Then it’s a date.”

Harry looks at her a little strangely. Probably because he _definitely_ didn’t think to classify this as a date. His idea of dates are nice dinners at fancy farm-to-table restaurants by the shore. And even though she’s only joking, Allie does sort of think all this is...fun. Yes, it’s scary as hell, probably dangerous too. And necessary, because she cares deeply about so many of the missing people, but it’s fun, too, on top of all that. Possibly her daredevil personality is coming back to her in all this. 

  


**

  
In the car on the way over to the school, Allie decides it’s a good a time as ever to bring up their encounter with Karen Bingham, aside from remembering about the smell and everything.

“So...is your mom always so dismissive of the girl you bring over?” she tries as Harry turns out of his gated community. He laughs, like he can’t tell if she’s being serious or not. Honestly, she can’t tell if she is, either. She knows Harry’s rep and had decided to sleep with him anyway. She probably would have back at the beach house, too, before they really became...whatever they are to each other now. It’s not that she’s trying to be precious about having lost her virginity, but he specifically told her that it was different for him, with her. Special, or whatever.

“There’s really only been Kelly,” he tells her. But he senses that maybe she’s looking for a little honesty here too, so he adds, “I mean, I’ve flirted around, yeah. I know my reputation. But as for _that_ , it’s...not as common as you’re thinking.”

“Apparently not,” Allie quips. He actually blushes. She feels stupid for feeling satisfied, because she doesn’t own Harry or anything and they don’t owe anything to one another, especially since there’s not even a label for whatever they are now. She thinks briefly about the concept of calling Harry her boyfriend, but they both just seem so far beyond that word right now. She’s in the middle of trying to unravel a time paradox within a multi-dimensional kidnapping case, she can’t have a _boyfriend._

“In case I have to say it again,” he says, taking his eyes off the road for a second to look at her earnestly, “it’s different with you. I’ve never felt this way about anyone before.”

He’s so open about it that it actually makes her heart hurt. She reaches over and ruffles the hair over his ears, pushing his head away playfully.

“Yeah, okay, you sap,” she says. “Pay attention to the road.”

His smile is fond, his laugh genuine. Yeah, she doesn’t regret moving in this direction with Harry.

That’s something else she’s realized. In all this—the uncertainty, the fear, the thousands of questions and worries filtering in and out of her mind as they deal with the quandary of time loops and multiple realities, Harry’s the only thing she feels sure of. And she likes that.

The day is already well underway by the time they pull up to the high school. Harry parks his car in his assigned space at first, but his is the only vehicle in the entire designated student parking area, which is basically a dead giveaway to their presence. Allie makes him move his car instead over to the visitors lot, under a tree in a spot on the end. He calls her dramatic and paranoid, but she doesn’t mind only because his eyes shift around suspiciously too, keeping an eye out for any stragglers outside who may have noticed them. There’s no one; West Ham is the type of sheltered that their township assigned on-duty security officer is a geriatric man who hands out Munchkins to students on Friday afternoons.

They manage to sneak in through the back entrance by the gym while a freshman class goes out to use the track for their period, circumventing the main office and sign in area. For that alone, Allie already feels spy-like, like they’re in a movie or something. Although that thought might be redundant—technically, they’re supposed to be here, after all, even though the notion of classes and routine has never been further from her mind.

Inside the school, the hallways are empty. It’s the middle of a period and everyone’s in their assigned classrooms, but it’s also a bit eerie, considering just over a quarter of the school’s entire population is indefinitely gone.

“What now?” Harry asks when they get to the main wing, past the gym entrance and the locker rooms. She looks down the different branching hallways, trying to decide; the main office and administration area is off to the right, around the corner. 

“I think I have an idea,” she says after some consideration, the beginnings of a concrete plan starting to form in her mind. If her suspicions are right—and thus far they have been—they should be able to be in and out fairly quickly, without anyone even knowing what they came for. “We have to go to my locker first, grab some stuff.”

“What ‘stuff’ could we possibly need?”

Allie rolls her eyes. “Okay, it’s just one thing. But we need it. Come on, follow me.”

Harry smirks. “I know where your locker is, Pressman.”

“Oh do you?” she says, a teasing smile finding its way to the corner of her lips. “You know my preferred LaCroix flavor, you know where my locker is. You been watching me, Bingham?”

“Guilty as charged,” Harry says, with no trace of humility whatsoever. Allie pokes her tongue against the inside of her cheek and then, after glancing around to make sure they’re alone, takes Harry’s hand to lead him down the opposite hallway to where her locker is. He doesn’t say anything, but presses his thumb surely against her knuckles and lets himself be guided along.

When they get to it, Allie quickly inputs her combination and crouches down to rifle through the extra backpack she keeps at the bottom, in search of what they need. Harry, for his part, leans against the next locker over, crosses his arms and his ankles, looking every part the charming, popular high school boy he is when she rises back to her feet. His eyes follow her movement, and she can tell he’s thinking the same thing as she is: _is this what it would have been like?_

“I thought about this sometimes,” he says to her when she reaches her full height, his eyes on her face now. “Coming up to you at your locker.” She has a feeling he knows the exact effect that he has when he tilts his head just so, also knows she’s not as immune to it as she pretends to be.

“I thought you said your crush was when you were like, nine. Is now when you reveal you’ve been obsessed with me for half your life and this is all part of some elaborate plan?” she jokes, mirroring his body language and leaning against her locker as she closes it.

“It wasn’t a crush by then,” Harry says, shrugging. “I just thought you were hot.”

“Oh, I’m _so_ flattered,” she responds sarcastically, trying to mask the fact that she actually kind of is. Nevermind how it goes without saying that she thinks the same of him. Has thought the same, for however long as guys in her brain could be classified as hot.

Harry’s tiny smile grows, blooming into a full-fledged smirk. He’s been learning how to call her bluffs lately, how to detect when she’s deflecting with sarcasm. It’s like he can tell what she’s thinking about, because he makes to close the gap between them, putting one hand on her hip to draw her in, bending down to press their lips together. She lets him, just for a bit, because yeah, this is fantasy fulfillment for her, too. And it’s probably the first and last time they’ll ever be able to do this, make out in the middle of their high school hallway against her locker.

But they’re here on a mission, so Allie pulls away before Harry gets too carried away, holds up the tiny USB drive in her hand up against her lips to discourage him from going back in for seconds. He arches a brow.

"Is that the thing we need?"

Allie nods, holding it between her thumb and forefinger. "Yep. While the front office people are distracted, I'm gonna sneak in and grab the files off one of their computers. That way we can look through it all later."

"Yeah? And what's gonna distract them long enough for you to be able to pull that off?"

She gives him a meaningful look, willing him to get it. He stares at her at first, uncomprehendingly, until she looks him up and down and his stare turns into one of disbelief.

"Oh, come on," he scoffs, "you can't be serious. What makes you think that's a good idea?"

"Uh, everyone who works in the front office is a nice, middle aged lady? And as I recall, you seem to have a certain effect on those," she answers sweetly.

He doesn't deny it, instead asking, "What the fuck am I supposed to say to them?"

"I'm sure you can come up with something," she says, patting his cheek. "Besides, they're already going to be willing to be distracted," she gestures with an open hand up and down his body, "with all this. Whatever you say doesn't matter, as long as you sell it. And I know you can."

She's buttering him up and he knows it, though he hides the fact that he's simultaneously pleased with her praise. "You," he says, and with that first word she can already tell that he's going to go along with her plan, "are fucking crazy."

"And you're here with me. What does that make you?" She doesn't wait for his answer, slips the flash drive into her back jeans pocket, and turns to head down the hall, towards the direction of the main office. Harry, his legs longer and his strides lengthier, catches up with her quickly, puts a hand on her elbow.

"And what are we gonna do if we get caught? Or what if we don't find what we're looking for?" he asks, sounding slightly worried. Allie just shrugs.

"Don't know. Try again tomorrow, I guess? That's the beauty of a time loop."

"Ah," Harry says lightly. "I...hadn't thought about that."

It’s true that it doesn’t feel at all like they’re in a loop, despite what the date on her phone screen tells her. Allie had thought about that this morning as they were getting ready, and then in the car too, and concluded that although the date itself is repeating, they’re not bound by any routine or repetitive actions, like some Groundhog Day situation. They’re free to have the run of the place, do whatever they need to do to figure this thing out. 

"Don't worry, Harry. This’ll work, trust me," she says surely, turning to him. She's not particularly concerned about their chances to pull this off, in the grand scheme of things. Her biggest fear is attracting unwanted attention, considering the fact that whoever or whatever did this to them could still be at large around West Ham. She definitely doesn’t want them getting an inkling if what she and Harry are up to. 

And maybe it's the daredevil in her back at work again—she's never, ever been nervous while performing a dare. This feels similar to that: high-octane, in the moment, do or die.

“They keep all the administration files together on the cloud drive. The perks of the age of information,” she says when they’re on the other side of the double doors leading into the office. The period is ending soon, which will bring a flow of students into the hallways and into the office. They’ll be able to blend in easily, slip in unnoticed, Harry can work his magic, Allie can copy the files, and then they can get out. There are exactly seven minutes in between periods, seven minutes to get this done.

They’re able to slip in relatively easy once classes let out and a throng of students fill the corridor; a few of them go into the office as well, as per usual—the kids who sign out early, have things to pick up, or just hang out in the well-lit, air conditioned space until the crowd passes.

Immediately, Allie makes herself scarce, sidling along the wall and plopping down in one of the uncomfortable benches lining the length of the reception area while Harry, purposefully, fixes his hair and smooths his shirt down. It helps that he’s wearing one of his usual button-downs; it makes him look put-together in a way that’s effortless. Allie thinks it’s a little bit ridiculous that he’s in high school and dresses like this, but...she can’t deny that it does look good.

She can see it now, the second his suave look slides into place. He actually throws her a wink—which is the moment Allie knows for sure that this is going to work—as he finally turns around to the two office ladies, one manning the reception area and another seated at a desk a couple feet away.

He clears his throat first and the two women, who have probably learned through years of practice to tune out students by now, both look up sharply at him.

"Hi, excuse me," he's saying, as Allie pretends to quietly look at her phone and not pay attention to any of them. She doesn't pick up her head to see what's going on, but can hear the smile in his voice. "How are you ladies doing today?"

She has to press her lips into a line at Harry calling them _ladies_ , but they eat it up, telling him sweetly that they're well, how is he?

"Doing great. I was wondering if—tomorrow at the end of the day, would I be able to make an announcement over the speakers?"

One of the women clucks her tongue. "I'm sorry, honey, we don't really let students do that."

"Aw, that's too bad. I was planning—ah, well. I was going to try to ask a girl to prom, but I guess it's just not written in the stars." He gives this sad little laugh, and immediately the women fall for it, hook line and sinker.

"How sweet," one of them gushes. Out of the corner of her eye, Allie spots the woman sitting at the desk turning in her computer chair to face Harry instead of her screen—now all she needs is for the lady to get up out of her seat so Allie can duck down under the reception counter and sneak back there. The other kids who had come in earlier have also been filtering out as they pick up their shit or whatever other reason they're here for, until it's just her and Harry, but still no one's bothered looking her way, yet.

"Yeah," Harry plays along. "One of her friends told me she really wanted it to be this big, special thing. Promposal, you know? And I really like her, I really want her to say yes..."

"Oh honey, who in their right mind would say no to someone like _you_?" Desk Lady asks.

She hadn’t thought Harry was capable of sounding modest, but he does when he chuckles at the compliment. "I was planning to make an announcement telling her to come out to meet me in front of the school, you know by the flower bed at the flagpole? That's where we first spoke."

Desk Lady seems to really be warming up to the idea. "Janine, you think we might be able to make an exception?"

Janine, or whatever, seems just as charmed. "So sweet of you," she says to Harry. Yeah, okay, Allie really needs all this to speed up. Harry evidently feels the same, because he pulls out his phone, really hams it up when he asks them if they want to see a picture of her.

It works in getting Desk Lady out of her chair, but Allie freezes—Harry had better not be showing them _her_ picture, they follow each other on Instagram and are Facebook friends, so there are plenty he could find, but she's trying _not_ to get spotted, here. She gives his phone the barest of glances when she makes her move, darting down behind the reception counter and over to Desk Lady's area. It's Kelly he's showing them, an old photo of the two of them together zoomed in on his screen. Good, smart. It makes sense. She doesn’t know why she defaulted to inserting herself into this completely fabricated scenario.

"Oh, you two would make _such_ a good-looking couple!" Janine gushes, zooming in further on Kelly's face.

"Thanks," Harry says, and—she spares yet another glance upwards—God, is he _faking_ a blush? How is he doing that? "She's actually blonde now, though. I think I prefer that." It definitely helps that both Desk Lady and Janine are blonde, though Allie doubts he’d said it for their benefit.

As Harry continues to scroll through, Allie successfully ducks down under the desk, out of sight for the time being. Thankfully, the West Ham education budget is big enough for all the school technology to be updated, so it's easy to unplug Desk Lady's Macbook from its magnetic charger and bring it under the table, where she's crouched down and getting the flash drive out of her back pocket.

She connects it to the laptop and clicks through the Finder files for a bit; everything is synced up in there, although the desktop is a complete mess of icons and screenshots, totally covering the wallpaper of Desk Lady with her family.

Busy looking through for anything that could be useful and copying it over to the flash drive, she thus isn't paying all that much attention to Harry, Desk Lady, and Janine. But she hears when Harry's voice suddenly raises, just slightly, a note of alarm tinged in his next sentence.

"Uh, actually," he says, a tad too quickly at first, though he goes back into character seamlessly. "I'm...really nervous, and you two have been so helpful. Would you mind if you came with me to the flower bed and I could walk you through what I have planned? Maybe practice? I have a free period next, so I won't be late to anything."

Allie freezes; this is definitely a ploy to get them out of the office, probably because Desk Lady or Janine had been about to turn around and spot Allie. But it works, it actually fucking works—they agree readily. 

Allie doesn't trust herself to poke her head out from the desk to see what's going on, just listens as Harry holds the office door open for them and they gush some more about what a gentleman he is, until they're gone. She heaves a huge sigh and goes back to copying as many files as she can, watching the door carefully to see if anyone might come in. There are several closed doors behind the reception counter as well, leading into the Principal and Vice Principal's respective offices, and other administrative areas, but by the time she's pretty much copied everything that she can, no one has come in or out of any of them.

She ejects her USB and replaces Desk Lady's Macbook gingerly, exactly the way she found it and, after another scan around, quickly scrambles back to the other side of the reception counter and then out the office door entirely, into the hallway and home free.

Since she has no fucking clue how long Harry might take, she texts him and waits for him by her locker. He shows up not five minutes later, looking exasperated as all hell.

"Have a good promposal?" She actively tries not to sound too teasing.

"They actually made me ask," he mutters darkly. " _Janine_ pretended to be Kelly and then Marsha suggested I get down on one knee, so obviously I had to fucking go along with it."

"Oh, well if _Marsha_ said so," Allie says saccharinely. Harry gives her a baleful look.

"Please tell me you got what we needed," he says, "because I am not fucking doing that again."

She holds up the USB triumphantly, which feels a little anticlimactic since it's a piece of plastic and metal and bears no visible evidence of their feat. But she feels proud all the same. "Your sacrifice was not in vain," she says, wagging her eyebrows.

"It better not have been," he says, running his tongue over his teeth.

"Hey, you're the one who came up with that concept, not me," she says, flouncing past him. He grabs her by the elbow before she can get far; not hard or anything, but enough to get her to stop and to pull her closer to him.

"Listen, Allie," he says, and now his tone is serious. "I'm glad we pulled this off, but this...this is real shit."

"I know that. Are you worried about city hall tonight? No one's even gonna be there, it'll be fine," she assures him, putting one hand against his at the crook of her elbow. He seems to realize he still has her in his grip and lets up, though instead of letting go, he turns his palm over and holds her hand. They've been holding hands a lot lately, she's noticed; she likes it. But he shakes his head, still looking serious.

"No, that's not it," he says in a quiet tone, conscious that they're still in school even though the halls are empty once again. "I'm...worried about what we might find. On that," he gestures with his chin at the USB in Allie's other hand, "and whatever's at city hall. Every single discovery we've made so far has, like, seriously altered my entire perception of reality, you know? And those have just been theories. This shit's hard evidence."

Allie softens. All their revelations thus far have been foundation-shifting for her too, skewing her entire view of reality and space and time, all the things in life that are meant to be scientifically constant. She understands: Harry's scared. Not just of what they might find from their snooping, but of what comes next.

"Hey," she says, shifting her hand around so their fingers are interlaced, "whatever we find doesn't change the fact that we're partners in this, okay? We'll have each other."

He smiles down at his feet, then looks up at her through his eyelashes, seeming to debate his next words before he finally says them. "If I asked you to prom right now, would you say yes?"

"What, no loudspeaker announcement for me? No getting down on one knee?"

He laughs a little, swings their interlocked hands between them. "Got a feeling that's not quite your style."

He's right; it's completely not. Allie thinks she'd just about die if anyone ever thought about asking her out like that, all flashy. She prefers things to be more casual—or better yet, more personal. She can also tell that he's thinking about it again, by the way he looks at her: the concept of her just being a girl that a boy wants to take to prom, on the precipice of their whole lives.

"Oh, Harry," she sighs, giving him a melancholy smile and leading him by the hand back down the hallway, towards the gym entrance from which they came. She knows her answer, of course she does. And he already does too, or else he wouldn't have asked. But it's time for them to get out of here, to leave West Ham High and the fun little fantasy where things are that simple. She feels it the moment they step outside and make their way back over to Harry's car—the shift in the air, the heaviness of multiple words weighing on her shoulders.

Through all that, Harry's hand never leaves hers. 

  


**

  
The very first thing they decide is that they shouldn't go back to Harry's house yet.

He thinks it's the right call; there's no telling if his mom might pop back in during the day; maybe she hasn’t even left yet. Lucy is also meant to come home at some point half past three. After that, they know the place will be empty for most of the night from how it all played out in the last loop, and they can use that time to grab the city hall keys. But Allie wants to examine what they've got as soon as possible, and his laptop's back at his house. She suggests going to the library instead, and—Harry doesn't think he's ever been to a public library in his life, no matter how nice the West Ham one probably is, considering their town’s tax bracket. He studiously does not mention this to Allie when he agrees, knowing that anything otherwise would be asking for ridicule.

They stop at Starbucks on the way over for coffee and tea and sandwiches because it's getting to be lunchtime and neither of them have eaten yet. He pays for her again, doesn’t even think about it before he does so since it’s just tea and a wrap. The barista draws hearts on both of their cups, because he guesses they look like a couple or something. It's okay; he's not going to say anything to the contrary. Neither does Allie. She smiles at the Sharpie heart, color on her cheeks, which distracts him so much that he burns his tongue on his coffee.

They’re the only ones in the entire place when they get to the library, though the librarian working the checkout counter barely spares them a glance. It’s the middle of the day, the middle of the week, so it makes sense it’s deserted, but it still feels weird and too quiet. It reminds him of the West Ham in his dreams, and he thinks about if this is what it’s like over there, all the time, everywhere.

“Let’s go back by the computers,” Allie whispers, tugging him by the shirt front in the direction of a section of slightly dated desktop computers in rows separated off by a glass wall, with a door leading into it. 

Inside, the quiet has a less oppressive quality to it, maybe because they're sealed off in between four walls and don't have to consciously keep at a low volume anymore. Allie takes a seat at one of the computers in the very front row and Harry pulls up a desk chair next to her, observing over her shoulder as she plugs her USB in and opens up the file.

"Wow. Not very discerning, were you?" he says as a mass of file icons appear in the window. She purses her lips.

"Nothing wrong with casting a wide net," she says primly, clicking to sort them alphabetically rather than in a jumbled mess. They click through for a while, trying to find any information about the field trip. Most of what they come across is mundane and irrelevant—the school's second quarter budget (way more of it goes into the football team than Harry had ever thought), vendor and point of sale documents, state curriculum updates. Allie makes a noise of frustration from her nose and makes the executive decision to click out of viewing and opening every individual document or spreadsheet, instead rearranging the file window to list view and scrolling through it, looking for keywords.

"There," Harry says just as she scrolls past a file folder titled `’EVENTS.’` He points at the screen, has her go back up and click into the directory, which unveils even more folders nested within, each meticulously named and dated for the various events put on by the school throughout the entire school year. Near the bottom, there's one titled `’NPS ANNUAL TRIP’` that has one of the largest file sizes out of all the others, second only to the `’PROM’` folder.

"NPS—National Park Service," Allie breathes, quickly clicking into it. Technically, the National Park Service has hosted their school as part of some federal program since the annual trip's inception, but that, as far as Harry knows, isn't supposed to include transportation to and from the park itself. Though he hadn't gone then, last year they chartered these huge Greyhound-looking buses that had bathrooms and wifi and and everything.

Maybe there's something there, so he tells Allie, "Can you find anything about means of transportation? Since we know they never even made it to the mountains."

"Let me see," she mutters, scrolling past park brochures, hiking maps, a folder full of permission slips and release forms.

"Any kind of contract between our school and the bus company, you know?"

"Wait," Allie says, pausing to think before looking over her shoulder at Harry. "Bus company? They were on West Ham school buses. I saw them, when my parents and I dropped Cassandra off the day they all left."

Harry frowns. "School buses? That makes no sense, it's like a twelve hour drive from Connecticut to Tennessee."

"...Yeah. You're right," Allie says, her eyes darting back to the screen. "How did I not realize that?"

"I thought they would have used the same buses they did last year, those huge Coach ones, you know?"

"Why wouldn't they?" she asks, scanning through the folder once again. "That's what we used on the sophomore trip to Radio City. Something's not adding up."

"Woah, go there," Harry says, standing up from his seat and moving so he can get in even closer to the screen, hovering directly above Allie's shoulder. "That one. 'Official Contract Nullification'?"

It's a copy of an official letterhead from a charter bus company, corresponding plainly and simply that `"the following contract (attached) is officially void and deposits have been return wired to the West Ham Board of Education,"` dated...the Saturday before the trip. May 8th.

"So there _was_ a coach bus service at first," Allie breathes, zooming in so she can read through the document again. "And they cancelled it at the very last minute...why?"

"Sort it by the file date," Harry suggests, bracing one hand against the back of her chair. "We can try to find whatever's most recent, see if anything came right after this."

"Good thinking," Allie murmurs. She does so, and there's only one document that appears in the list above the contract nullification with the charter bus company, meaning it's the most recent, just a single pdf that's simply titled ‘`Agreement`.’ The file date says it's also from that same Saturday.

With bated breath, she opens it up. Harry leans in close to read it, wisps of her hair brushing across his cheek as he scans each line. The gist of it is pretty easy to grasp, and then after that—the dots practically connect themselves, here. He takes a step back, blinking.

"Some company said they were partnering with NPS and offered to drive us for free as long as they could use the district buses," he summarizes when Allie turns around to look at him with wide eyes, just so they can hear it out loud. He knows she already gets it. "And because this town's obsessed with money, they fuckin' cheaped out and went with this random company to save costs without vetting the drivers. Or the company itself."

Allie nods fretfully. "Yeah, that sounds about right."

"Whoever did this—whoever was driving those buses—they must have known that the township would agree to this stupid proposal," Harry says, running a hand through his hair. He's angry, angry that the adults in town apparently don't have enough foresight to smell something so obviously fishy going on right under their noses, or are otherwise willing to turn a blind eye to it for the sake of saving a few dollars. At the risk of their children's safety. Some fucking role models.

Allie seems to have something else she's trying to figure out, because she turns back abruptly in her chair and opens up an internet window, runs a quick Google search.

"The company," she says, scrolling through the search results, which look rather bare. "Multi-Color Transportation Co.? I can't find anything on them. Not a website, not a business bureau entry, not a Google Maps location."

"Jesus," Harry says, pinching the bridge of his nose. This is making him lose all respect for the school leadership and everyone at city hall.

"It's like they don't even exist...but they're here talking with our school, so?" Allie says, clicking back and forth between Google and the agreement document. The logo printed on the upper left hand of the page for Multi-Color Transportation Co. is a small flute or some other kind of wind instrument, it's hard to tell. It seems completely random.

"I think this is where the freaky shit starts to come in," Harry answers, going back to stand behind Allie again. "Whoever was driving those buses obviously is capable of a lot that doesn't fit our definition of 'reality,' you know?"

"Yeah," Allie says, leaning against the mesh chair backing. Harry's hands automatically go down to her shoulders, resting them there while she tilts her chin upwards and looks at him, her face upside down as he stands over her. "The one thing I don't understand is... _why?_ What's the reason for all this? What are they hoping to accomplish?"

Harry presses his thumbs against her browbones, smooths them along their ridge and brushes her flyaways out of her eyes. "I don't know." 

  


**

  
After the library they go back to Harry's house, with the coast clear now that it's late into the afternoon, so they can grab the spare keys from his mom's office and because Allie wants to take a shower and change into fresh clothes. She's still wearing what she'd worn yesterday, a sweater with wide blue and white horizontal stripes that's prone to slipping down over one shoulder and a pair of faded jeans.

"I feel like it's been days, you know? Even though time is all confused right now. I feel gross," she says in the car, wrinkling her nose and tugging at her hair. She looks far from gross, in Harry's opinion, her hair curling and messy around the crown of her head. And the blue suits her, though he'd realistically think the same of just about any color she might wear.

While she's upstairs (Harry tries very hard not to think about the fact that she's using _his_ bathroom, is naked right now in _his_ shower), he lets himself into the study and retrieves the spare keys. His mom keeps them locked in a safe on the bottom rack of her bookshelf, along with the stack of solid gold bars left behind by his father as insurance. Harry frankly doesn't know what the fuck he could do with the gold beyond trade it in for cash if things ever get that desperate, which he doubts will happen.

Allie's hair is still wet when she comes back downstairs to the kitchen where he's waiting. He's never seen it like that before, which is an entirely new distraction itself.

"Is that my shirt?" he asks, tugging at her sleeve. It's damp because she has all her hair gathered to that side, the ends of it dripping wet patches onto the gray cotton t-shirt that she has on, the extra fabric tied off and tucked in below her belly button.

"Haven't exactly had time to do laundry with all this going on, you know?" she says, blinking up at him, her face glowing and fresh from the shower. "Hope you don't mind."

He can't help it. He draws her in, slipping one hand under the hem of her shirt— _his_ shirt—and kisses her, her hair streaking cold water along his cheeks when he presses in close. "I think you're so sexy," he murmurs against her lips. She laughs like she's pleased and hits him against the chest lightly.

"Did you get the keys or not?"

So single-minded. It's cute. He pulls them out of his back pocket and dangles them on his index finger in front of her face. "What do you think?"

She twists her lips and snatches them from his hands, goes over to her backpack lying on the floor against the kitchen island and puts them securely into the front zip pocket. In the main pocket, she has a folder of the bus-related documents that she insisted they print out in the library so they could have hard copies just in case. Harry hates to think about what the "in case" situation might entail.

"You're doing okay?" she asks him when she stands up, her hands in her back pockets. "You know. With all the new stuff."

He gets it; she's checking in to see if any of this is overwhelming or too much for him to handle. "Yeah. I think the key is accepting that shit's only going to get crazier from here on out, you know? That way nothing's unexpected anymore."

She cracks a smile. "Yeah. I'm just still stuck on why this is all happening. Like, what did we do to deserve this? Why did _my_ sister and all my friends have to get kidnapped?"

He feels for her, he really does. But it also makes him realize that...all the people over there, in the other world—he doesn't have any particular connection to them the way Allie does. Yeah, he's the popular guy and is well-liked by mostly everyone, but there's no one that he _misses_ , on an individual level. And the same goes for the people over here, too—Allie also misses her parents. He can tell. She's upset that they've all but forgotten about her, how they haven't bothered checking up on her, even though that's because of the weird spell or whatever. But Harry doesn't have that relationship with his single parent, and Lucy...she's so busy off with her own life anyway, already a pro at taking care of herself at just nine years old. The closest thing he has to an important person in his life that he might actually miss right now is Allie herself.

Something stirs in his chest at the thought, something big and unnamed that's all too soon and all too much. Allie, her hair darker than usual from the water, dripping onto his kitchen tiles, his heather gray shirt on her shoulders...maybe she's it for him. The rest of it—West Ham, the other world, the buses, whatever—they don't matter as long as she keeps looking at him like that. 

  


**

  
It's just barely turned dark when they drive over to the city hall building. Allie's never been before, but Harry knows the way around fairly well from the times his mom made him pick up or drop off things. The building doors are locked, but Harry pulls the set of keys from the front pocket of Allie's backpack and they're able to get in easily.

Inside, all the lights are shut off, the hallways and corridors lit only by the ominous red glow of the exit signs posted around the main doors. The first floor is reserved for administration and city council chambers; all the individual offices and records rooms are on the second floor. Harry lights their path with his phone flashlight, leads Allie over to the staircase door so they can go up. His mom's office is in separated area that all share one secretary and reception area, directly across from the Mayor Eliot's private office.

"Is that a good idea?" Allie asks when Harry flicks the lights on after he lets both of them in. He shrugs.

"There's no one here, Allie. And we have to be able to see whatever we're looking for."

She glances around and then nods reluctantly, setting her backpack down at the secretary's desk. "Come on, let's start with my uncle's office."

Harry's never met Mayor Eliot before. He's vaguely friendly with Campbell in the way he is with most of the guys in his grade, but has never spoken to Sam before. It's hard to picture them as siblings, let alone related at all, but he thinks Allie and Sam are close.

"What's he like? The mayor," he asks Allie when they open the door to his office. The inside is a cluttered mess, metal storage shelves full of cardboard file boxes stacked from wall to wall. There's a desk off to the side, littered with papers and with a built-in lamp, but no computer or laptop in sight. Mayor Eliot, apparently, hasn't caught onto digitizing things yet, unlike the school. Harry exhales—they certainly have their work cut out for them.

"Honestly? I barely know him," Allie says. "He never really...hung out at family things. It was usually my aunt, even though she's not the one we're related to. At Thanksgiving and stuff he was always in the other room, on the phone. My mom used to get real pissed about it.”

“So no insight to where he might want to keep classified information revealing a multi-dimensional conspiracy theory?”

Allie rolls her eyes. “Ha ha.”

There's nothing to it but to start looking through the boxes and papers. Allie figures out that they're sorted vaguely by date, with the most recent files closer to the door, which is good because they can rule out having to go through all the racks closer to the opposite wall.

They lift them, box by box, drag them across the floor and sit with their legs crossed, reviewing as many documents as they can. The worst part is that they have to be meticulous about how they put them back into place because Allie's afraid of messing too much with the space-time continuum if they leave everything scattered across the floor. At least half an hour or so passes where neither of them speak, too absorbed in flipping through the pages. Harry ends up spending more time on irrelevant ones than he probably should, but a lot of them are actually pretty interesting—and not in a good way.

"He...kinda seems like a shitty guy," Harry says after a while of looking through countless papers. He's just finished reading yet another insulting riposte signed from the mayor responding to complaints from the public works department or whatever about how their benefits are vastly subpar compared to those given to upper level officials. He also pressured the West Ham Zoning Board into denying approval for some affordable housing units to be built along the east border and, in an email with one of the at-large city councilors, made a joke about how gerrymandering "isn't really necessary in a town like ours - and let's keep it that way."

"No kidding," Allie says, replacing a stack of papers into a manila folder. "Apparently some landscaping company tried to sue him for refusing to pay for re-mulching the elementary school playground last year, and he got the case thrown out because he's friends with the judge."

"God," Harry mutters, reaching into the box nearest him and fishing out a thin manila folder from the very edge of the cardboard, either the first or last thing shoved in. "Have things around here always been so fucked up?"

"Probably. And we've just been too privileged to even notice it happening."

It's the sad truth, Harry realizes. West Ham, full of its big houses and expensive cars, nearly everyone upper-middle class or above. He's never thought about what it takes to keep it things that way, everything ugly that must happen behind the scenes to maintain the perfectly polished exterior of their town.

He's about to make another comment about what a piece of shit Mayor Eliot is—along with all their elected officials, really—when he finally reads through the words on the paper he's holding, parses their meaning and lets them sink in. "What the fuck?" he breathes, flipping over rapidly to the second page.

"What?"

"Holy shit.” He scoots over to sit next to Allie, their knees pressing together so he can show her the paper up close. "It's a letter here from some guy named...Pfeiffer? Demanding one and a half million dollars for—look." He points the words out to her.

"Smell removal," Allie whispers. He turns over to the next sheet; this one is printed on official City of West Ham letterhead, with a seal at the top and everything.

"This one's a response, signed by your uncle, refusing to pay. And look at the date."

Allie reads, then turns and looks up at him. "May 9th. The day before the others were taken."

"The day after the deal with the school and the weird bus company."

"Also around the same time the smell came back and then disappeared again," Allie says. Her eyes are wide—things are falling into place. They're really about to get to the bottom of this. The answers to the essential questions are all starting to line up.

"This could be it, Allie," he says urgently, quickly taking the papers from her hands and spreading them out flat on the floor. He snaps several photos of them just in case, and then replaces them within the manila folders and back into the box. "We could really solve this thing." Part of him hadn't truly thought it'd be possible when they started, but now, with this...it's seriously looking like it might actually happen.

Before she can respond, there's a distant sound of a heavy door being opened, followed by some footsteps. Harry recognizes it as the door that leads out into the stairwell that they’d taken to get up to the second floor. Shit.

" _Fuck_ ," Allie hisses, scrambling to her feet. "Someone's here, get all this shit back up."

There's nothing for it; Harry does as he's told, his heart suddenly racing. The two of them hastily shove the boxes back onto the metal shelves where they found them. He's thanking their lucky fucking stars that they were so meticulous about replacing the documents themselves, otherwise this would be three times as stressful as it already is.

"Shit, the light," Allie moans quietly as they step out of the mayor's office and close the door behind them, back into the area that has the secretary's desk and his mom's office door across the way. It's the only light on in the entire hallway—whoever's coming can surely, surely see the sliver of it from under the closed door, shining like a homing beacon. And the footsteps are getting closer, whoever it is is coming right for their area, there's no doubt about it.

Harry rapidly goes over the different options in his mind. They could sneak into his mom's office and hide out in there. But then how would they explain the light being on? And what if whoever it is decides to stay, and they're trapped in there all night? Or they could make a run for it, just scurry out the door and try to outrun whoever it is, or something. No, that's ridiculous. Another idea crosses his mind then, which...well, fuck it. It always works in movies and shit and they're running out of time and it's the only thing they have right now.

He strides over and sits himself in the secretary's chair, pulls Allie with him by her belt loops and gets his hands around her hips. The footsteps are getting closer, along with the jangle of what sounds to be a keyring, and a male voice muttering indistinctly in confusion, probably about the light still being on. "Get on top of me," he hisses through his teeth.

Allie gives him a look that says _'you can't be serious,_ but they really have no time. He hoists her up so she's straddling him, gets one hand in her hair and the other firm around her lower back, trying to really sell it, starts making out with her like there's no tomorrow. She makes an amused sort of snort in the back of her throat, and he has no idea how she can have the energy right now to find this funny, but she plays along, responding with a fervor that neither of them have really reached before in all the other times they've shared real kisses. He's too anxious for it to be all that enjoyable though, even when she drags her teeth across his bottom lip in a way that, had she done it in any other situation, would make him melt.

When the door opens just seconds later, his vision is obscured by her wild mess of blonde hair as she whips around in mock surprise at having been caught, and he can't see who it is right away.

"What in the—? Who are you?"

Allie yelps and scrambles off of Harry, finally leaving him to see—yeah, it's Mayor Eliot himself, still wearing a pressed shirt and slacks with a briefcase in hand.

"Uncle Stephen!" Allie squeaks. This time the surprise in her voice is genuine.

"Allie?" Mayor Stephen Eliot says, recognition coloring his voice. He turns his eyes towards Harry. "And young Harry Bingham." He definitely doesn't sound pleased, but his shock seems to be wearing off now that he actually recognizes who the intruders are. Harry hadn't realized the mayor had known his name, although he and his mother work so closely together, so it makes sense. "What in God's name are you two doing here?"

"Um." Allie fidgets—well, the answer is obvious, but clearly the mayor is looking for a better explanation.

"My mom asked me to come here and get something, sir," he says, filling in once he sees her waffling. "And Allie and I were, uh, out together, so I decided to bring her along, and then...we just got carried away."

It's an easy sell, but also easy to believe, considering they now know the adults in this town don't have very much regard, apparently, for their children. Plus they definitely look the part of dumb, horny teenagers who can't keep their hands off each other—Allie's hair is wild and her skin is flushed and Harry's sure he doesn't look any better.

"Karen asked you? She told me she had to leave early today. Well, I suppose that woman is always working odd hours," the mayor says, although Harry thinks he buys the story at face value. Weird, because hadn't his mother told them this morning that she'd be working late?

"We're so sorry," Allie blurts out, shifting around uneasily on either foot. "We didn't think anybody was going to come by, honest, but even then we shouldn't have done it."

Mayor Eliot lets out a chuckle. "Relax, I'm not going to bust my niece for breaking into city hall. And I know you two are good kids. Just don't do it again, okay? If Karen needs something, she can keep it to office hours or come get it herself," he says sternly.

"Yes, sir," Harry nods. Allie echoes him.

The mayor nods his approval, motioning with his head for them to get going. "Now get outta here you two, I've got some midnight oil to burn, if you don't mind."

Harry and Allie both nod in unison. Allie picks up her red backpack from the floor and Harry awkwardly stands from the chair, clearing his throat and smoothing his shirt down. They pass by the mayor on their way out. Harry can't bring himself to meet his eyes, just ducks his head down and nods in acknowledgement. He thinks he hears the mayor chuckle to himself as they're through the doorway before stepping back out into the darkness of the hallway.

Neither of them dare to speak while they make their way back down the stairwell and through the first floor of city hall, not until they're back out into the night air. Allie lets a huge breath whoosh out of her all at once, as if she'd been holding it all this time.

"What a piece of shit," she says viciously as they get back into the car. Harry agrees with her—sure, he'd let them off the hook and dismissed them as the dumb, horny teenagers they were pretending to be. But he thinks that if they weren't literally related to the people working in the office, they'd be so fucking busted right now.

"I can't believe he bought it," Harry says, still dazed from it all. Allie turns her shoulders towards him, crosses her arms.

" _I_ can't believe _that_ was your plan. What the fuck?"

"Hey," he protests. "It worked, alright? And I didn't see you coming up with anything else."

She blows her hair out of her face. "Whatever. At least we got what we came for. You have the pictures, right?"

He sure does. His phone's burning a hole in his pants pocket with the weight of it. But their first priority should be getting the hell out of here, before anyone else discovers them sitting in the city hall parking lot, uncovering the town conspiracy piece by piece. So he backs the car out, starts driving them back along the surface streets back towards his house, which they at least know will be empty for the rest of the night.

"So...the person behind this. Or at least the face of it," Allie begins as they drive along. "Pfeiffer."

"Yeah."

She's shaking her head while staring straight ahead out the windshield, her arms still crossed in front of herself. "This is all because of our parents," she spits. "This ‘Pfeiffer’ person is mad that he didn't get paid, and then to get revenge on them, or teach them a lesson or something, he decides...to _kidnap_ their kids. We have nothing to do with it at all. We're just the fucking collateral."

"Except it didn't even work," Harry chips in, his index finger tapping nervously against the steering wheel. "No one's even fucking noticed they're gone. And they forget about us, too," he reminds her.

"And also," she says, "if they _really_ wanted to make people suffer, then why us specifically? Like, yeah, we're their children but...not all of them. Lucy's still here. Everyone younger than sixteen is still here. Literally only people our age were taken."

"Because," Harry says before he has a concrete answer. Then he pauses, the thoughts turning over in his mind. It actually makes sense if he examines it from the angle of the whole thing being meant solely a punishment for their parents and their parents alone. "We're capable of taking care of ourselves, relatively speaking." He thinks about the dreams, though, the burning car, the gun to Cassandra's head, the shattered store windows. "More than actual children or preteens could, at least. If they dropped little kids off in the other world, half of them would probably end up dead, you know? But us...we're old enough to survive on our own, but young enough to still be considered children. For it to hurt when we're taken away."

"If only our parents could actually remember us enough to be hurt, though," Allie says softly.

"Yeah," Harry sighs. "I wonder why that is."

"Actually, I think I know." He looks over at her, an eyebrow raised. "It's the mistake. Us. The same reason this day keeps repeating, you know?"

"What makes you say that?"

"Well, it's like this. We know the who—Pfeiffer. We know the where—an alternate world. We know when all this started going down, from the dates on all those documents. We even know the why—a punishment for the adults' greed. It all lines up. But something went wrong, something that this Pfeiffer guy didn't account for: us. Think of it like a set of gears turning. Cause and effect, one link turns another, right? But we're two pieces that have fallen out, and now we're preventing the gears from working like they should."

"The repeating day," Harry says, nodding slowly.

"And the forgetting. Maybe they were supposed to have forgotten in the span of the ten days, you know, as part of the spell or whatever, to prevent any action from being taken, give it time to settle. But tomorrow, the day after the others are supposed to have come back, maybe is the day our parents are supposed to remember us and realize something's horribly wrong. Only they haven't yet, because today keeps on resetting, preventing them from moving on."

It makes a disturbing amount of sense. He takes one hand off the wheel and runs it through his hair, feeling, as he so often does these days, worn thin and weary. "Okay. We had questions. We stole information from the school, we broke into city hall. Now we have at least some answers. So...what comes next? What do we do?"

The _one_ in the twenty-something to one equation. Whatever they need to do to make something change, to unstick this day, to make their parents realize what's happening, to get their friends and family back, to make the world right again.

Allie, for once, seems to be at a loss for words and out of plans. She brings a hand up to her temple and says, "I have no idea." 

  


**

  
Even though the house is empty, they still squirrel away in Harry’s room as soon as they get back. Allie plants herself facedown on the bed groans into the sheets, wanting all of this to end. Harry gives a small laugh at the sight of her, runs his hand in between her shoulder blades, which as nice as it feels, does nothing to soothe her troubles.

“Let’s just think about it tomorrow, okay?” he says, bending down so his voice hovers somewhere above her head, low and steady. “We did a lot today.”

That’s true. But it’d been easy then, all the questions plaguing her needing answers that had come, somehow, readily to them once they started digging. A thousand more questions still remain, but these ones don’t have any visible paths toward a solution and are, by nature, more complicated. Like, who exactly is Pfeiffer? What did he do about the smell? And how is he capable of sending two-hundred-odd kids careening into an alternate reality? And what are they supposed to _do_ about it?

She feels at her wits end and exhales, long and slow, into Harry’s mattress. “This day felt like it lasted forever,” she mumbles, turning her face over so just half her cheek is pressed into the comforter. His bed is extremely comfortable; it’s huge, a California king or something, definitely some kind of fancy mattress and even fancier sheets, all goose down and Egyptian cotton. And it smells like him, a weird mix of sweat and aftershave and boy that she actually kind of loves.

“Well, I got bad news for you on that front." Harry sounds light, trying to make a joke out of it. Allie lifts a corner of her lips weakly; it’s sweet that he’s trying to get her to smile. She’s not normally like this; out of the two of them, she’s usually the one with more motivation and energy. But today really has felt like an eternity, time loop or no, and the idea that all days might be like this for the foreseeable future...it’s tiring even to think about. She can’t believe that this morning she thought it would be fun.

“Can you Airdrop me those pictures or something?” She props herself up on his bed by her elbows and lets her hair fall over one shoulder.

"Sure."

She fishes her phone out of her back pocket and accepts the notification when it comes through. The pictures are relatively clear and easy to read; she zooms in on the documents and scans them again, just for something to do. They still say the same exact thing, the demand for $1.5 million, the subsequent refusal. This is obviously a trend for their town—$1.5 million is a hefty sum, sure, but the same cannot be said about the situation with the landscaping company and the playgrounds. God, she really hates her uncle, as it turns out.

"Pfeiffer," she muses, wondering if she's allowed to say the name out loud. Like if she repeats it three times he'll appear or something, like Bloody Mary. "Who is this guy?"

"Beats me," Harry says, settling down on the bed next to her. They're lying side by side on their stomachs, arms pressed together. "I've never heard of anyone in town with that name before, and I know about most of the families around here, you know?"

"It sounds German," Allie says. "I wonder if that matters." She clicks out of the picture, making her phone go back to display the most recent contents of her entire camera roll. There are multiples of the same photo of the documents taking up a couple rows, and then on top of that, a couple random shots she grabbed from around the beach house and Greenwich, which feels now like a strange interlude, the calm before the storm. One of the beach that morning she attempted her run, the water looking gray and choppy in her photo when it had been rather blue in real life. Harry walking in front of her while they were on the boardwalk, his back turned to the camera, his shirt tails floating behind him in the breeze and his hair ruffled. The strawberry tart he'd gotten her, before she devoured it in about three bites. She smiles; they're nice photos even without the context.

And further up on top of those are the pictures Cassandra had sent her from the bus. Blurry photos of the inside of the school bus, a lot of individual and group selfies, and candid shots of all the others on the bus. They feel a little sickening to look at, even in miniature on the camera roll page, knowing that those depicted will never reach their intended destination, knowing that the very bus from which the photos are taken had been driven by someone intending to take them far, far away from home as some kind of twisted revenge for the sins of their parents.

"Hey, wait," Harry says next to her. He's been mostly quiet this whole time, observing her thumb through her phone silently, both of them lost in thought. "Go back up to—that one." He selects the photo for her, which automatically enlarges it to fit the whole screen.

It's a selfie of just Cassandra looking directly into the camera, with the little smile she always does when she's taking photos of herself. Allie calls it her "selfie smile," because no one actually smiles all that tiny and mysterious in real life. She's confused as to why Harry picked it, until he moves his finger across the screen once and shifts the photo over to the left, so that Cassandra is only halfway in the frame. Directly behind her head is the driver's seat, and the driver himself: an unremarkable, dark-haired man looking over his shoulder and practically directly into the camera, almost like he'd been aware that Cassandra was taking a photo at that very moment.

"Oh my God. Is that—?" Allie begins, turning her head over to look at Harry. That's the bus driver, or at least one of them. And they finally, finally have a face to this whole thing, even if it's blurry and badly lit and out of focus.

"The bus driver, yeah," Harry says, but then he takes her phone entirely out of her hands, holding it in his and zooming in even further on the bus driver's face with his thumbs, as close as the screen will allow. "Not only that, though—I think...I know this guy."

" _What?_ How?"

"Remember how I told you I went to do something for my mom at city hall on Friday, but she was too busy to talk to me?" Allie nods. "It was because she and Mayor Eliot were busy talking to _this_ guy in her office. They looked like they were yelling at him about something, and he was just sitting there taking it. Don’t think he said a word, and then he stared at me all weird when he left the office."

"You're not saying..."

"Maybe this is Pfeiffer himself," he says.

"And you're sure this is the same guy?"

"I think so. I mean—they’re definitely the same person. But I can’t say for sure whether he’s actually Pfeiffer.”

“Well we need to make sure,” Allie says, pushing herself upright in bed on her knees. “If this is our guy, maybe we can find him.”

“And do what? Ask him nicely to give our people back? Allie, he’s dangerous. We shouldn’t go _looking_ for him.”

“Okay, well, even if that’s true we should still make sure it’s actually the right person.”

“And how are we gonna do that?”

Allie bites her lip. “You said he was at your mom’s office, right?”

“Yeah.”

She raises her eyebrows at him meaningfully. “How much longer until she’s home? Think we have time for one final snoop session today?” 

  


**

  
The study looks to be in the exact state it had been when they saw Karen Bingham sitting in it this morning, save for a few papers and files taken from the workspace. Allie perches on the corner of the mahogany desk while Harry takes the chair and turns on her computer.

“You know her password?” she asks when he boots it up and it prompts him for the log in. 

“Pretty sure it’s just my birthday,” he answers, typing quickly. It works, the screen lighting up to her desktop. The wallpaper is the generic default one, just some kind of blue gradient that Karen obviously had never bothered changing.

“Why is everything around here so easy to hack?” Allie jokes, getting up from her spot on the desk so she can turn around and read the screen as well, leaning in close.

“Because adults are fucking stupid,” Harry mutters, pulling up his mom’s email and document windows. He runs a search for the name “Pfeiffer” in Outlook, but nothing comes up. Same thing with the internal files. Allie frowns, leaning in closer to the screen.

“Try sorting it by the date, we can pick out what’s most recent. Kind of like the boxes in the mayor’s office.”

Harry does so, but none of the first couple things they click through are relevant. There are a lot of contracts and official-looking legal documents that Allie can’t make sense of, but none of the names and topics scattered throughout them are familiar to her, and none of them say anything about Pfeiffer, Multi-Color Transportation, the school trip, or smell removal. Karen Bingham, apparently, is better at covering her tracks than the other adults, or otherwise isn’t as involved as they’d originally thought.

“Maybe she didn’t know,” Allie says, drawing back in disappointment. Harry shakes his head.

“Then why was he in her office? I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but...she was going in on him pretty hard. There’s gotta be something.”

He turns back to renew his search efforts, but just then, a message window pops up—Harry’s mom must have her texts synced to her desktop. It’s a corner notification, one from Gary Aldrich that reads: _Just got the drinks. I’ll be up in a minute. ;)_

“The fuck?” Harry clicks on the notification. It makes the entire messaging app pop up on the screen, as well as Karen’s chat history with Gary Aldrich. Gary Aldrich, who is…

“Is that...Kelly’s dad?” Allie asks, leaning in close once again. “Is _that_ where your mom is tonight?”

“What the fuck,” Harry breathes numbly, his eyes frozen on the screen as he scrolls through, way up. “The guy she’s fucking is _Kelly’s dad_?” 

They have a long, long chat history that spans...well, it was happening while Harry and Kelly were still together. And—she pays close attention to the dates as Harry continues to scroll—since before Harry’s dad even passed away. A lot of the messages are just about times they’re available to meet up, they have some kind of regular room at the very inn Harry and Allie had stayed at when they returned to West Ham from Greenwich. Sometimes they talk about Harry and Kelly, vague mentions like Gary complimenting Harry’s performance on the debate team or Karen saying she heard Kelly was doing great on the prom committee. Allie feels gross just reading it. Next to her, Harry has gone completely stiff. She turns towards him, wanting to put a hand on his shoulder and say something of comfort, but this…

He scrolls back to the beginning of the chat, with the most recent correspondences showing up in the window. Allie watches as his Adam’s apple bobs, is about to say something about how fucked up this is, but then something catches her eye on the screen as the chat resets.

“Wait.” She takes the mouse from Harry and guides the scrollbar back up to the messages that had gotten her attention. They’re from last Thursday. “Look at this.”

_Gary Aldrich: Can u sneak away tonite?_

_Karen Bingham: Maybe later. Have to go over this contract._

_Gary Aldrich: Tomorrow?_

_Karen Bingham: Pfeiffer’s here then. Might get ugly_

_Gary Alrich: It’ll be easier once the kids are away._

“So it _is_ Pfeiffer,” Allie concludes, stepping back and putting her hands on her hips. Harry still hasn’t moved, his eyes frozen on the screen, the back of his neck tense. “Harry? Are you seeing this? This is our next lead, this is what we have to chase now!” She gestures towards the screen, the obvious solution to the hopeless apathy that consumed her when they first returned to Harry’s house.

“For fuck’s sake,” Harry mumbles under his breath. Allie bites her lip; maybe she’s being too overeager. And a little insensitive, considering what they’ve just discovered about his mom. The two of them seem to have a fraught relationship, to say the least; Allie doesn’t know the entire history, but, despite all that, she’s still his mother and has had a profound effect on turning him into who he is.

“Harry, I—” she begins, ready to apologize, maybe take things a little slower. He’s right about one thing: they can handle it tomorrow, they have nothing but time on their hands.

He stands up abruptly, turning around and bracing his hands on the desk on either side of his body. He looks pissed.

“What are we doing all this for, Allie?”

She pauses. “What do you mean?”

“This is meant to be a punishment for our parents, right? And I don’t know about you, but it kinda seems like they deserve it.”

“...What are you talking about?”

“I mean, my _mother_ ,” he spits the word out, gesturing sharply behind himself at the computer screen. “Your uncle, the people at school, everyone else who’s had any hand in making West Ham the place it is. Maybe they deserve it.”

At this, Allie bristles. “And what about all the taken kids? What about my sister? Do _they_ deserve it too?”

Harry shrugs a little helplessly. “From all we’ve seen, there’s no reason to believe they have any larger threats facing them, other than the ones they make for themselves.”

“I don’t—what are you trying to say?” Allie says. She doesn’t like where Harry’s going with this, not one bit. He looks angry, angry and desperate and lost, and unlike himself. Unlike the Harry she’s gotten to know these past few days and weeks, more like the boy she saw in high school antagonizing her sister and being an asshole to anyone who stood in his way.

He softens slightly when he hears the tremor in her voice, though, pushes off of the desk and steps closer to her, takes one of her hands. His are shaking, she realizes, and his face is pale. He takes a deep breath, and when he speaks again, his voice is gentler, though there’s still something bitter and sharp tinging it. “Do you ever think about—what would have happened if we just stayed in Greenwich? Let ourselves forget about all this fucked up shit, and just. Grow old, in the beach house?”

Allie’s mind instantly recoils.

She can’t believe what she’s hearing. She snatches her hands out of his and steps back. “No,” she says, harshly. “No, I don’t think about that. At all.” Harry’s jaw tightens, and his hand hovers in the air for a moment before he lets them fall back to his sides. But Allie’s angry enough to not give him a chance to speak. She snaps, “This may all be some kind of game to you, but it’s not for me. I want my _sister_ back. I want my parents back. I’m sorry that you don’t have any of that going for you, but you can’t ask me to run away with you and forget it all just because you don’t have anyone else in your life worth saving.”

Harry opens his mouth. “I wasn’t—”

“But you were!” Allie interrupts. “You were about to ask.” She can tell from the look on his face that she’s right. He doesn’t even try to make any attempts to the contrary. She shakes her head at him, a cavern of disappointment cracking open somewhere in her chest. That, on top of _everything_ else from today, has finally worn her thin enough to feel like she’s going to tear apart at any second.

For the first time, she can’t stand being here with Harry. Can’t stand the way he’s looking at her, like he’s at a complete loss for words, can’t stand that he would even _think_ about asking something like that.

She gives a muted scoff and, at once, brushes past him, down the hallway and into the kitchen to the garage entrance that they usually use to go in and out of the house. That seems to spur him into action; he catches up with her when she’s halfway out the door, her shoes already pulled on.

“Where the hell are you going?” He sounds exasperated, like she’s overreacting, and that in itself makes her anger flare up again.

“Away from here,” she bites. And then she’s out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the next part is the wrap up for real this time i promise!!!
> 
> also some crumbs in here for those in the know on the show's pied piper inspiration ;)
> 
> [tumblr](https://dystopians.tumblr.com/) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/harrybinghams)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It feels like an absolute lifetime ago that he watched her leave from that same front door and climb into his car when he picked her up for Greenwich.
> 
> Then, she was just a cute girl that he thought he could while away the days with, and they were trying to run away from their problems. Now, they're running headfirst into them and...Allie is way beyond just "cute girl" territory for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> featuring: the (possibly not so) thrilling conclusion

As Allie walks, she realizes that she’s still wearing Harry’s shirt. It’s not like she has any other options, though, but it’s just a t-shirt and it’s chilly enough outside now that night has fallen for goosebumps to break out across her skin. She hunches over and folds her arms across herself.

In her back pocket, her phone buzzes. No doubt it’s Harry calling her. She ignores it, lets it continue to vibrate with each ring until it finally goes silent once more, when she’s at the mouth of his neighborhood. She’s been walking rapidly, her eyes trained on the pavement in front of her, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. She has no idea where she’s going, just knew in that moment that she couldn’t be in his proximity any longer.

As she continues on, it dawns on Allie that she hasn’t been alone, properly alone, in days. Every waking moment of the past...however long it’s been, has been spent with Harry. Playing detective. It feels silly now, for her to have put so much faith in him. And yeah, okay, she knows deep down that this argument is probably stupid and tiny in comparison to what they’re facing, but she’s still _mad_ , damnit, and she wants some time to just—be alone and angry.

He’s calling her again, and texting too. She puts her phone on do not disturb mode so she won’t have to feel it every time he does.

After about half a mile, she decides this is stupid, clears all the notifications on her home screen from Harry without bothering to read them, and opens Uber. She doesn’t want to go to her parent’s house, precisely, but she also doesn’t want to walk all night aimlessly. As she’s scrolling through the map of West Ham trying to decide a drop-off location, though, something rustles in the nearby hedges. Allie freezes in her tracks, snapping her head up to peer around in the night.

Suddenly, just how _alone_ she is truly hits her—and sure, crime rates in West Ham aren’t high enough for her to feel scared of any of the usual things a girl walking alone at night might be freaked about, but this is her first time on her own since discovering the whole conspiracy. She’s more than a little unsettled at the noise, plus she hasn’t been paying attention to where she’s going either, too focused on putting distance between her and the Bingham house. There’s a rustle again, and she looks around nervously, part of her wondering if she should suck it up and call Harry...although with the way she’d stormed out, maybe he wouldn’t want to come get her. She bites her lip, wondering what it means that even though she’s mad at him, he’s still the first person she thinks to reach out to in the face of danger.

But then something about the street she’s on clicks into place, recognition blossoming in her mind. She hasn’t exactly been in this spot before before, not in person—she doesn’t know anyone who lives in this neighborhood she’s wandered into—and yet, it’s familiar. The last time she saw it, it was dawn, and garbage bags were piled high on that exact curbside, under that exact street lamp, and the air had an unfocused, surreal quality to it. It was in one of the dreams, Harry next to her, her hand in his, as they watched…

...a dog, the black and white border collie, come bounding out of the hedges. From the exact same spot from which it comes now. But instead of sniffing around at non-existent garbage, this time it comes straight towards Allie, wagging its tail, its tongue hanging out of its mouth.

“Hey,” she says, crouching down and extending her hand, all her trepidation vanished. The dog sniffs at her lazily, perfunctorily, and then pushes the top of its head into her palm. She obligingly gives it a few strokes along its ears. “Where did you come from?”

The dog looks into her eyes and licks its chops. It’s a loaded question, one that she inexplicably knows the dog understands, somehow, and one that doesn’t have a simple explanation. The collie does nothing but blink at her, its tail swishing against her knees. “What am I doing?” she mutters to herself, wiping her hand across her forehead. Talking to a magical dog?

But the dog whines, paws at the hand holding her phone, and then looks back towards Harry’s house before turning its head in the opposite direction, towards the main area of town that Allie had unconsciously been heading. Then it whines and paws at her hand again, nudges its nose against her phone, leaving a damp spot on the screen that she wipes away on her jeans.

“Yeah?” Allie straightens up. “You know where I should go?”

The dog blinks at her, cocking its head to one side. She shakes her head a little incredulously at it. And then she furrows her brows, because...the dog is here now, and it’s the same night as the one where they returned from Greenwich, and they also saw the dog then, running out in front of the car. She checks her phone—she doesn’t remember exactly what time it had been when they’d come driving back, but it’s almost eleven now. She supposes there’s enough time between now and then for the dog to go running off into the night so it can reappear in front of Harry’s car at the right moment.

“Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere?” she asks.

It barks once, wags its tail, and then nudges at her wrist again, the one holding her phone. The app is still opened to the map, but it’s been jostled around enough to have shifted the location pin, which is hovering now over one particular spot.

Allie thinks she knows where she’s supposed to go. 

  


**

  
The inn, at this time of night, is still empty save for the bored looking receptionist at her desk.

From Allie’s vantage point outside the window that looks directly into the small lobby, she can see her scrolling through Facebook on her phone. The brick exterior is cold and gritty against her palms, pressed flat against the wall, as she strains upwards to get a decent view through the glass from her spot around the side of the building. There’s ivy growing all around the sill and she’s pretty sure she’s trampling on a flower bed, but she doesn’t care.

There are two other cars in the parking lot; Allie has to suppress the disgust when she realizes that they must belong to Karen Bingham and Gary Aldrich, who are here tonight. Staying in the same bed and breakfast that past-Allie and past-Harry are about to show up at, any minute now.

Like clockwork, she hears the crunch of tires against asphalt. She doesn’t have visibility of the parking lot from her spot around the corner, but she can hear the car door open and close, followed by two pairs of footsteps shuffling towards the front entrance. They’re here—or _she’s_ here. Allie doesn’t know. This whole thing requires a level of mental gymnastics for which she is not trained.

It’s genuinely the weirdest, most out-of-body experience she’s ever had when she hears her own voice, from some yards away, tell Harry to wait for her to grab her bag from the back seat of the car. She presses herself into the side of the building further, nestling her body into the climbing ivy, when the pair of them pass by even closer, though she knows for a fact that she hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary that night. That she can remember, anyway. Is it possible to change the past, in this whole thing?

Definitely better to not chance it.

It’s even weirder when she peers in through the window again, careful to keep her head off to the side to avoid being seen, and spots past-Allie and past-Harry in the lobby. Past-Harry is talking to the receptionist now, trying to book their room, while past-Allie hangs back. She looks apprehensive and scared and tense. Allie can recall all too vividly what she’d been feeling in that exact moment. Everything was still new, they only just realized that something was fucking with their memories, and she remembers feeling terrified of everything and everyone. Of going home to parents who might not even recognize her. Of her own mind betraying her, wiping memories from her without her permission.

And then Harry turns around, two keycards in hand, and Allie watches as the tension melts from past-Allie’s shoulders. She makes a joke about something, it’s impossible to hear, and past-Harry responds in kind, the two of them turning from the lobby to head up the stairs. There’s a polite distance between them—not a ton, but more than there’s been in recent days.

Allie keeps her eyes trained to the spot past-Allie and past-Harry had been long after they’re already gone. It seems ridiculous that the dog had guided her here, just to have her watch this small interchange, but...she feels different. Better.

She pulls her phone out of her back pocket, finally swiping into the messages that Harry’s sent her. The first couple are just demands about where she’s gone, followed by some apologies, followed by some words about how it’s unfair she left before they could even discuss, which...is a little bit of a valid assessment.

The last few, though, are simple. 

_Bingham: Please just let me know you’re okay._

_Bingham: That’s all I care about._

She chews at her thumb as she reads through, and then clicks into the text bar to reply.

_Pressman: I’m okay. Can you come get me tomorrow morning? From my house._

His reply is instant.

_Bingham: I’ll be there._

Allie pockets her phone, rummages her way out of the landscaping by the window, and gets back onto the sidewalk. She feels lighter. More self-aware, and more self-possessed.

Watching past-Allie interact, just for those scant few moments, with past-Harry...it had been clear to see there was something between them, however small and budding and surface-level at the time. It’s precisely because of that Allie realizes exactly how _different_ it is now. Seeing herself had thrown things into sharp relief, exposed the depth of what she feels now: inextricably tied to Harry, even in the middle of an argument, even with how angry she’d been at him earlier in the night. 

He’s not an anchor tying her down to one particular place or another, not like she’d thought he was when they saw each other in their dreams. Rather, he’s a link. One that is connected to her, their fates bound by some mysterious force, the two missing pieces that, together, are preventing the awful supernatural machine from turning as it should. Instead of keeping her grounded to one place, he moves with her, alongside her.

Plus, it had been plain to see: past-Allie had liked Harry, sure, but she wasn’t in _love_ with him.

Present Allie...cannot say the same.

And that, perhaps, is the root of it. The real reason she’d gotten so angry, had overreacted the way she had by storming off alone into the night. Because if he’d asked, really and earnestly _asked_ her to run away with him, away from all this madness, back to Greenwich where things were blissful and they could eat junk food and pastries and race along the streets in the rain and laze on the beach, she honestly would have been tempted to say yes.

But she can’t, and she’d bristled at the betrayal in her own mind. Because she has other people that she—she _loves_ , too, damnit, and they deserve somebody to stick by them the way Harry has stuck by her.

That’s also why she’s decided that, just for tonight, she needs to go home. To her own home, see her own parents, sleep in her own bed. So she can remember why she’s doing all this, without Harry in the equation, distracting her with his charming smile and his two freckles at the corner of his mouth and his tender eyes and long lashes. She’ll see him in the morning. And then they’ll do the hard part that comes next, together.

When she lets herself in through the front door of her own house, her parents are still awake, chatting around the kitchen table. They’ve always done that, which is something Allie only now realizes that married couples don’t always do. Just talk to each other, spend empty time together. Talk late into the night. Her parents are each other’s best friends—she’s always known that. Now, though, she realizes it’s something special.

“Allie,” Jim says in surprise when she appears in the entranceway. “Honey, are you just getting home? We didn’t even realize you were around.”

“It’s okay,” she answers, toeing her shoes off. No mention of the fact that she’s actually been gone for days, including all the time she spent at the beach house. But that’s nothing she hadn’t already known, and she’s not taken off guard by the surprise on her parents’ faces when they see her. “I’m here now.”

“You hungry?” Amanda asks, standing up and going over to the fridge. “I can fix you something?”

“Here, sit down with us.” Her dad gestures over to one of the empty kitchen chairs. Allie’s chair, the one she always sits at during their nightly dinners. Both it and Cassandra’s designated chair are tucked under the table, bare, unmoved for days.

She has to stop herself from getting emotional. Her parents, up until this moment, had forgotten she’d even existed. But once they see her, their first instinct is to take care of her. Include her. All this time, with all the forgetting...her parents have never been hostile about it, never dismissive, like Karen Bingham had been. Only politely and mildly confused, but still showing their care in little ways.

“No, that’s okay.” She masters her voice so she doesn’t accidentally start crying. “Maybe we can watch a movie or something, though?”

“That’s a great idea, Al,” her dad says, sitting up from his dining room chair and going to sag into his usual spot on the recliner in front of the television. “You can choose the movie.”

She picks _Finding Nemo_ , because it had been her and Cassandra’s favorite when they were little, and maybe she’s feeling a little masochistic about the irony of it. Amanda, without being asked, starts microwaving some popcorn and brings it over in a big bowl to split between the three of them. It has a squeeze of lime juice on top, because that’s how Allie likes it. Allie curls into her mom’s side on the couch like a child, lets her hair be absentmindedly stroked as they watch the movie.

“I forgot how sad this story actually is,” her dad comments at the beginning, when Nemo’s mom and all his siblings are eaten. Allie buries her face into her mother’s shoulder.

Halfway through, her eyes start getting heavy and her head starts dropping down towards her chest. Her mom rubs circles onto her shoulder, lulling her even further into drowsiness. Jim glances over and presses pause on the TV, the living room going quiet and static without the movie playing in the background.

“I think it’s time for bed, ladies,” Jim says, standing up and stretching his arms up above his head and groaning in a way that is distinctly dad-like, big and bold.

Above her, Amanda taps the crown of Allie’s head gently, trying to rouse her. Allie sits up and her mom smiles at the sight of her, stroking a hand against her cheek. There’s an imprint there from the couch cushion, wrinkled across the otherwise smooth skin. She feels incredibly young. Like a child. Like a daughter.

“If I ever got lost like that, you’d come find me,” she mumbles, turning her tired eyes between her mom and dad, “right?”

Her mom smiles again, pinches softly at the tip of her ear, playful. “Of course we would. What kind of a question is that?”

“Okay, come on, Nemo. Bed time,” her dad says, heaving Allie up from the couch by the arms. She lets herself be pulled until she’s standing upright, blinking from the vertigo. She believes her mom. In her core, she knows it to be true—and if they could just remember Cassandra, they’d do the same for her, too.

Her dad kisses the top of her head as she passes by, up the stairs and to her bedroom. Cassandra’s door is still closed, she sees dimly, but she doesn’t try to go inside. Instead, she goes into her own room and shucks her jeans and her bra off, but keeps Harry’s shirt on, undoing the knot in the center where the extra fabric is tied off, and falls into bed. She has no idea if it’s past midnight—it must be, just from how long they’d been sitting in front of the TV. But the time reset must not manifest itself in any physical method, other than as a strange pulling sensation she has in her stomach that’s easy to ignore once she hoists her covers up over herself. 

The light in her room is the same as it always is at night, the street lamp diagonal from her window brushing a soft glow under her curtains, her chair piled high with discarded clothes she never put away, her string lights and polaroids outlined against her wallpaper. Downstairs, she can hear her parents having a muted conversation, still caught up with chatting with one another. 

Maybe the adults in West Ham do deserve some kind of punishment or retribution. The Karen Binghams, the Stephen Eliots. But not like this—not at the expense of people like Jim and Amanda Pressman. Harry had been wrong about that part. 

  


**

  
Watching Allie leave had, at first, made Harry mad. Is wanting to be with her, independent of all this crazy shit that they have to go through, really the worst thing in the world? Is he really the worst person for just thinking about it?

But all that is to cover up the deep-seated ache that forms in his chest as he watches her slam the garage door behind her. As he's left alone, really alone, in this house that doesn't even feel like belongs to him anymore, not without the sight of her, with wet hair, leaning against his kitchen island, or with her feet dipped into the pool out back, or fidgeting nervously at the banister of the stairs. Places she's only been once or twice in passing, and yet he's still managed to develop a strong association between her and them.

So he calls her. To get her to come back, to spit some retorts that he didn't get a chance to before she was out the door, he doesn't know. It doesn't matter, because she doesn't pick up.

Harry had been sorry for the suggestion to run away before he could even get it out fully. He knows it's fucked up, though part of him longs for it, he does. But he'd been feeling raw and open and just—so fed up with everything going on, including his mom fucking Gary Aldrich on top of it all. So filled with anger and disappointment and sick of it all in that moment, he had grasped onto the only thought that worked to mitigate that huge mountain of negativity: the concept of them, together, free of their otherworldly burden, free of holding the fates of two hundred others in their hands.

For a second, there’d been a fire in Allie's eyes and he’d thought they were about to have a fight about it, blowout style. Had started to mentally prepare himself for it, even, because God, her words and stung too— _"just because you don’t have anyone else in your life worth saving."_ The harsh truth of them, not sugar coated in anything to make swallowing them the least bit easier.

But then she didn't fight with him, had given him this _look_ instead, suddenly all closed off, like she didn't recognize him. Like he wasn't the person she'd seen all along, the person he wants to be when he's around her. Maybe that had hurt even more than her words. And then she left before they could have a chance to get into it.

Harry retreats silently to his room. Tries calling her again. Tries texting, too.

It strikes him, as he catches sight of the moon from the wooden slats of his blinds, that maybe it's not safe for her to be out alone at this time of night. Kids from their town have vanished, spirited away into another world and...what if that happens to her, too? A weird panic seizes at his chest at the thought, but it's clear that she doesn't want to talk to him, despite his efforts. Is she safe? Has she been taken? What if their last moment together is that argument, that way she'd looked at him? The ache turns into something sharp, needling at his ribcage, and he has to force himself to take deep breaths to even himself out.

He texts her one last time and resolves to go out and look for her, their fight be damned, if she doesn't respond in half an hour or so.

But then she does, a few minutes later and—the acute pain dissipates, melting back into the dull ache of not having her here with him. It's okay, because she's safe, she's at her parents' house, and it seems like she's willing to talk to him in the morning. Harry can tell her that he's sorry, that he didn't mean it, not in the way she'd interpreted, at least. 

At the end of the day, Harry doesn't care where they go or what they do, as long as he can stay with her.

Before falling asleep, he stares up at his immobile ceiling fan for a long, long time, something thick welling up in his chest, turning over Allie's words in his mind.

She's wrong about one thing. He does have someone in his life who's worth it.

And perhaps it's because he has the notion of sacrifice on his mind, but suddenly, the obvious solution for their next steps falls into place. He knows what they're supposed to do. 

The only question left is how they're going to accomplish it. 

  


**

  
In the morning, Harry barely feels like he's gotten any sleep.

His dreams had been all confused, halfway between actual nightmares conjured by his own subconscious and flashes of the other world. In those parts, Allie hadn't been with him this time, maybe because this is their first night in a while not sleeping in near proximity to one another. Harry recalls something about Kelly suggesting they throw a prom, just to lift everyone's spirits, something about Gordie and Bean tracking down an old farmer's almanac to make note of the unusual solar eclipse.

That part's good, because it lines up with the exact same thing Harry had discovered the other day, but the rest of it gets all foggy and jumbled with dreams of Allie disappearing like smoke between his fingers, gone away to a place neither here nor in the other world, and no matter how hard he looks, he can't find her. 

Out of everything he's been through in recent days, those dreams scare him more than anything in their strange reality.

The most important thing, though, is that he needs to go see Allie. To make things right, or whatever, and to tell her what he's realized. But as he's driving over to her house as soon as it’s an acceptable hour, the thought strikes him that—maybe she doesn't want to make things right. Maybe they're over, the whole thing short-lived, falling fast and hard with no landing pad waiting for him at the bottom. Maybe she’ll tell him she only wants to focus on the mission at hand and nothing else, nothing between them.

It doesn't feel over for him. Not by a long shot. And he can only hope against hope that it's the same for her, because if it's not—well. Harry doesn't know what the fuck he's going to do. (Even though he does, sort of—he'd still help her in whatever way he could. Even if they can't be together, he still wants to solve this with her, wants her to have her home back.)

But when he texts her that he's there, she smiles at him as she comes out the front door and the ache that's been in his chest ever since she left last night disappears, replaced by a relief so intense that it makes his blood rush in his ears. She smiles like she’s self-conscious, embarrassed, but happy to see him regardless, gives him a tiny wave of her hand when she closes the door behind her. 

It feels like an absolute lifetime ago that he watched her leave from that same front door and climb into his car when he picked her up for Greenwich.

Then, she was just a cute girl that he thought he could while away the days with, and they were trying to run away from their problems. Now, they're running headfirst into them and...Allie is way beyond just "cute girl" territory for him.

"I'm sorry," is the first thing to rush out of both of their mouths as soon as she's in the car. Harry laughs sheepishly and Allie ducks her head down.

"No, let me," he insists. Her body is angled towards him, open, her hands folded together in her lap. "I shouldn't have suggested—it was fucked up. I didn't mean it."

Allie gives him a tiny smile. "You shouldn't say things you don't mean, Harry," she says softly.

"I know," he sighs. "I was just...in a bad way, you know? After everything we found out. I just wanted to get away from it all, with you, but...I know you can't do that. _We_ can't do that. I was being selfish."

"I'm sorry, too," she says. "For overreacting like that. And for being insensitive about the whole thing with your mom. I can't imagine how awful that must feel."

Harry gives a shrug. Honestly, he's barely thought about the thing with his mom, too preoccupied with thoughts of Allie, who takes up a much larger space in his brain than Karen Bingham does. "It's par for the course."

"It still sucks. And you’re allowed to be upset about it.” She smiles at him thinly. And then she continues, her voice hesitant, “And, you know, the real reason I got so upset was because...I wanted to say yes. If you asked me to go. Part of me would have wanted to say yes, and I didn't want to have to make the choice to give that up. Because I would have."

He gives an ironic twist of his lips, feeling comforted that, in some aspect, she sees where he's coming from. Though he does now feel more apologetic for having put her in that position in the first place.

"Harry," she continues, seeming like she’s willing to move on, move past it, "I seriously don't know what I would have done without you in this mess."

He reaches over and takes a lock of hair out of her eyes with just his thumb and forefinger, smoothing it into the rest of her wild curls. He really loves her hair. Loves all parts of her. "Me too," he says, and it's there, in his voice. He knows she can hear it, too.

They share a look and—it's unspoken. Harry suddenly feels like they're two idiots, sitting across from each other in his car, both sorry for how they acted and both feeling the same thing, but too afraid and embarrassed to say it out loud. He shakes his head and laughs at the both of them, then brings a hand around Allie's head so he can press a kiss to her temple.

"I know it was just one night," she mumbles, "but I missed you."

"God, Pressman. Desperate much?" 

She grins wolfishly. "Oh? That wasn't you blowing up my phone?"

There’s his girl.

He wrinkles his nose at her and cuffs her gently on the chin, though it comes out as more of a caress. She doesn't seem to mind. "So did you just walk all the way back to your parents house or what?"

At that, Allie heaves this huge sigh and looks at the roof of the car, a secretive little smile on her lips. He doesn't know how to take that, especially when she says, "Let's just say that the plot is apparently never going to stop getting thicker."

It's fine, he's not going to press her about it if she doesn't want to share. "Yeah, I've also been thinking," he says, deciding to breach the subject now that their personal troubles are behind them. They can move onto the bigger task at hand. "I, uh. Think I know what we're supposed to do next."

"That's funny, because so do I."

He raises his eyebrows at her. "Yeah?"

She nods. "I don't think you're gonna like it."

"No," he says, "I don't think I am."

She takes a deep breath. "We have to leave West Ham. We have to go to the other world."

He's already nodding as she speaks. He'd figured that out last night, too. It's the obvious solution, of course it is. It'll reset the timeline, get the gears in motion again. Make things right. It feels like a long time coming to arrive at this relatively simple solution that has been hanging over their heads this entire time. Their being in this world is a mistake—so this is only the natural answer.

"So the question remaining is: how do we get from our world to theirs? Not like we can just get on some school buses," he says.

"No," Allie replies, shaking her head. "I think I know how. The actual question is what should we leave in this place, not how do we get to the other. The ones we leave behind—we have to tell them how to find us, and everyone else. How to make this place better than how we left it."

Harry honest to God thinks the world of Allie Pressman. He'll do whatever she says, because he knows she's right. This, today, is their _one_ —the chance to do something that sticks. 

  


**

  
As it turns out, they have a lot to do.

Allie tells him that if they're leaving today, which she fully intends to do, that means whatever happens on this Wednesday will be the version of the Wednesday that actually sticks. Thursday will arrive and they’ll be gone. So they need to make the most of it, gather as much information as possible to leave behind for her parents in order to solve things.

"Your parents?" Harry had asked skeptically when she informed him. They're driving over to the bakery across from the middle school, because today might be the last day they're going to get the luxury of certain foods, including strawberry pastries that Harry hasn't been able to get out of his mind ever since that night on the beach.

"My mom, specifically," she clarifies. "Do you remember how your mom mentioned her? It seemed like they didn’t like each other."

"Yeah?"

"It's because my mom's an auditor," Allie explains. "And I bet you anything she was investigating some kind of malpractice going on in city hall. Financial or otherwise. Which we now know exists for sure."

"Shit, yeah."

"Yup. So if anyone can connect the dots, it's her."

Allie's red backpack with all the files about the bus situation is still back at Harry's house. They head directly there to pick it up after getting pastries and after Harry finally, finally gets to taste the sugar and strawberries from Allie's lips.

"You have no idea how much that little stunt drove me crazy," he says afterwards, unable to keep the smugness from his voice.

"I do know," Allie says primly, sounding smug in her own right and wiping the last of the sugar from the corners of her lips. That itself nearly makes Harry go back in for seconds, but he contains himself, because they have a mission to accomplish. 

Allie doesn’t bother getting out of the car when they arrive back at Harry’s house to grab the backpack, even though Karen’s car is missing from the garage at this point. She claims it’s because she doesn’t want them getting distracted with the task at hand, which makes Harry think she has an inkling about him wanting to press her against the granite kitchen island, just because it might be the last time they’ll get to be there. Hell, he wants to christen every spot in town with her in commemoration of their last day in this world, but he keeps those thoughts to himself.

Just to be as thorough as possible, Allie wants to go back to city hall and pull the business licenses for Multi-Color Transportation Co., or at least check if they exist. It's public record, she argues, and they have every right to go in and ask for it.

"I looked it up earlier in the morning on the city hall website—by law, any member of the public is able to get a copy of the business filing records," she informs him. "It could have an address for this Pfeiffer guy and their whole weird, last-minute fake bus company."

Even though he kind of doubts it, he admires just how resourceful and determined she is. Since it's the middle of the work day now, the city hall parking lot is nearly full, unlike how it had been deserted at night when they'd come to break in. Harry sees his mom's car in one of the spots and tries hard to ignore it.

This time, they can stick to the first floor, which is reserved for the city council chambers and administrative purposes, and if this isn't administrative, Harry doesn't know what is. They wander around for a bit before a random employee asks if they can be helped and then points them in the right direction for the person in charge of dispensing and organizing business licenses, stashed away in one of the corners of the vast first floor.

Allie asks for the business license for Multi-Color Transportation Co. several times before the attendant at the counter says, politely but with rapidly thinning patience, "Ma'am, as I've said, there's no such record. If they're a real company, they're not registered in the City of West Ham. You could try the Fairfield County Clerk's office if you really want."

That's a dead end—they're unable to leave town. Allie looks like she wants to argue, but Harry gently steers her away with a hand on the small of her back and an apologetic smile to the attendant, who watches them leave with disinterest, likely accustomed to dealing with difficult members of the public.

"The chances of us finding an address were slim to begin with," he says, rubbing up and down her arm, trying to make her feel better. It had been a shot in the dark; Pfeiffer, obviously, doesn't give a shit about following bureaucratic procedure.

"I know. I'm just—I'm scared that what we have so far isn't enough. What if it's not enough?" She turns to him, fretting at her lower lip. "What if they can't find our guy, and then can't find us?"

It's definitely a possibility. But they're not working with nothing, either. "Then we'll find a way back ourselves," he says firmly. "We know so much, shit that the others probably have no idea about. And think of all the people who are over there—Cassandra, Gordie, all the top minds. If you and I have done this much already, think about what we'd be able to do with all of them."

Allie gives him a watery smile. He doesn't know if it's because this is the first time he's ever said something nice about Cassandra, in a roundabout way, or because of the hope he feels whenever he thinks about him and Allie and what they've accomplished. That thought he had a few days ago—that together, they could do anything—he really believes that.

They're nearly at the front entrance of the building, right by the mouth of the city council chambers. She doesn't seem to care, pulls him into a hug right then and there, burying her nose into his collarbone. He huffs in surprise and pets her head, wrapping one arm around her waist and holding her there. Some of the adults who pass by smile at the sight, others shake their heads or roll their eyes. Harry doesn't give a shit.

Until, that is, they're interrupted by his mother's voice emerging from the chambers. 

"Harry?” she cuts in, sounding surprised to see him. Allie draws away from him then, turns around so she's standing at Harry's side. Karen Bingham's gaze snaps to her. "And Allie Pressman." She sounds the way she had the other morning, matter-of-fact, assessing the two of them astutely and remaining as reserved as ever, her true feelings on their relationship kept to herself. Harry can tell, though, from the tiny telltale signs—the purse of her lips, the minute twitch in her eyebrow, the critical sweep of her gaze—that she doesn't like Allie. It had been hard to decipher the other morning, and he thinks he can only tell now because she’s been caught off guard by their presence. "What are you doing here, honey, did you need something?"

Harry doesn't know how to tell his mother that he, right now, can't stand the sight of her. She's wearing a pair of crystal earrings that he knows for a fact his father had given her on one of their anniversaries, and his jaw tightens. "No, we were just leaving."

She seems to accept the lack of explanation, or otherwise doesn't care enough to pursue it any further, because she sighs and says dismissively, "Fine. I'll see you tomorrow—I'm going to be working late tonight, so I might not make it back. Lucy's all scheduled out, too, so you don't have to worry about her."

Harry holds his tongue, not wanting to make a scene. He's about to grab Allie's hand so he can tug her away, but she resists, and when he looks over, she's got a fire in her eyes and her jaw is set.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," she says acidly, looking straight at his mother. Karen raises a single eyebrow, looking up from the stack of papers she has in her arms.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me," Allie snaps. "You're pathetic. Every one of you in this building."

And then she turns on her heel and heads straight for the door, her curls flowing out behind her with the speed at which she walks. Karen, looking only mildly ruffled, turns to Harry.

"You sure know how to pick them, Harry," she says sourly, and yeah—that's not gonna fly.

"Fuck you," he spits, and then also turns away before he can see her reaction, a sense of liberation rising in his chest as he follows Allie out the door and into the afternoon sunlight. She's leaning against the tail of his car, all her earlier hardcore bravado gone, biting at her thumbnail.

"Oh my God," she says, the words rushing out, when he gets close to her. "I cannot believe I just did that, looking at her made me so _angry_ but I can't believe I just—"

He sweeps her into his arms and slants his mouth against hers, right there in the parking lot, his hands going into her hair, pressing her backwards so she bends at the waist against the body of his car. She makes a strangled, cut-off noise, but then responds, surging up to meet him, runs her hands up his arms. "That," he says when he draws away, "was the hottest thing you've ever done."

That startles a laugh out of her, and she slings her arms around his shoulders, clasping them together around the top of his spine, blinking prettily. "Well, she deserved it."

He can't argue with that.

As they get back into the car, though, a thought is turning over in Harry's head. What Allie said earlier, about what they have not being enough—and then seeing his mother...it gives him another idea.

"Wait, where are we going?" Allie asks when he puts the car into reverse, because they haven't talked about their next destination yet.

"Have to make one more pit stop back at the house," he tells her. "I think I have something that'll help."

After he convinces her to come inside, promising that he'll keep his hands to himself, he guides them back to his mom's study. Allie looks around uneasily, because this is where they had their fight last night, and this is where Karen Bingham had sat, just earlier this morning, before Allie called her pathetic.

"This room has some bad energy," she mutters, which makes Harry laugh because she sounds like one of the weird art kids who had been sitting in that occult circle on the green in their dream, the one with the solar eclipse. She seems to hear it too, because she rolls her eyes and presses her lips into a thin line, which Harry knows to mean she's trying not to smile.

She leans on the floor-to-ceiling bookcase rather than on the desk as he crouches down, inputs the code into the safe stashed at the bottom shelf—also his birthday, his mother seriously needs to get more creative—and opens it up.

"Oh, Harry," Allie breathes when he unearths the bars of solid gold, holds one up for her. "Aren't these from your dad?" She reaches for the bar he's offering her, takes it gingerly. It's heavy, though, and she has to shift it so it's sitting atop her palm instead of between her fingers. Harry'd mentioned to her about the gold that night at the beach house, as they talked through the walls and over the phone.

His dad, obsessed with sailing and perhaps fancying himself some kind of pirate, or something. As far as insurance payouts go, Harry thinks it’s stupidly impractical and done for idealistic, self-serving reasons rather than any actual desire his father had to make sure his children were taken care of. He shrugs. "They’re not doing any good just sitting there, are they? I don't know if it's $1.5 million exactly, but...should be somewhere in the ballpark, probably."

He extracts all the bars from the safe, piling them in a pyramid on top of the desk, each hunk of metal dull and thick as he sets it down.

"I think that's enough for Pfeiffer, don't you?" he says, standing up and kicking the safe shut.

Allie, leaning over and staring at the solid gold in her hand, is speechless. "Are you sure?" she asks him, and he can tell that she really, really wants to take it all and use it for the payment the town reneged on, but she cares to ask because this is like his inheritance (though not all of it, admittedly) and all that's left behind of his late father. And, at the end of the day, it's a fucking lot of money. Even for him.

"Your parents aren't gonna try to steal it, are they?" he quips with a crooked smile.

Allie shakes her head, and then places the gold bar in her hand at the very top of the pyramid, completing the shape. It glints softly from the light coming through the windows on the other side of the study, reflecting onto the walls and floor for just a moment when the sun hits it at exactly the right angle before it's obscured by the outside landscaping. "Harry, this is...perfect. This is enough. Thank you."

He's happy to help, though he thinks saying it out loud would make it sound insincere, even though it's true. 

  


**

  
When it starts to turn dusk and they've gathered all that they can, Allie has Harry drive the both of them back to her house.

She's sort of gotten it in her head that she wants Harry to meet her parents. Because she thinks it would be good for him to know the people whose hands they're putting their fates into, and because it would be nice for him to see that not every adult in West Ham is greedy and corrupt and deserving of retribution.

And then there's also the fact that she wants her parents to know who Harry is, as well, if they're to leave tonight. She wants them to know who he is to her, and wants them to remember him upon their return.

"You're...asking me to dinner. With your parents," he says dumbly when they pull up in the driveway and she invites him inside. He doesn't look entirely convinced.

"I want them to know who you are," she says. "And how important you are to the search, when they get to it."

"They don't know who I am?"

That's just pure Harry Bingham talking, in disbelief that a single soul in town doesn't know his name. Allie rolls her eyes. "They know you, you know they do. But they don't know _about_ you. Except for whatever Cassandra's told them."

"Yikes. That doesn't bode well."

"Come in and prove her wrong," Allie insists, giving him an entreating look that he falls for. He grumbles as he gets out of the car and lets her lead him up to the front door, under the awning with the hanging perennial flower baskets on either side that her mom always sets out as soon as the weather turns reliably nice for the season.

When she lets the both of them inside, she can hear her parents bustling around in the kitchen. Her mom has the jazz station on, which she always likes to listen to as she cooks, and her dad is making wine suggestions. They pause when they hear the front door, though, as Allie and Harry step in.

"It's me," Allie calls down the hallway preemptively, before they come looking.

"Allie! We didn't know you were home," her mother calls. "I don't know how I forgot. Let me get out some more things for dinner, then."

"I have someone here with me," she says, moving forwards towards the kitchen. Behind her, Harry hangs back until she motions with her head for him to follow. "If that's okay." 

The Pressmans, in general, have an open-table policy for any of Allie and Cassandra's friends that they want to have over for dinner. Will's been around countless times, as have Becca and Sam. There was one summer where they were hosting huge, seven- or eight-person dinners on a regular basis and her mom made cocktails for them all to try, weaker than actual ones, Allie could tell, but still exciting and fun. Her parents are natural hosts; they love company.

"Someone here?" her dad says, appearing in the hallway. His brows shoot up when he spots Harry, and then her mom appears at his side, her old apron that she bought from a trip to Paris tied around her front.

"I think you guys know Harry Bingham," Allie says, gesturing with her thumb over to Harry, who instantly straightens up and holds a hand out for either of them to shake. Trust those ingrained rich boy manners.

"Sure, of course," Amanda says, clearly caught off-guard, but shaking Harry's hand nonetheless. Unlike Karen, however, Amanda doesn’t bring up that she knows Harry’s mom. Also, Allie can see the struggle in her eyes, because she's meant to not like this boy, and it breaks Allie's heart that she can't remember the reason for that is because of Cassandra. "What brings you around?"

"Ah, Allie insisted," he says politely, and Allie purses her lips slightly at being thrown under the bus. Her dad gives her a look, one that lets her know he senses what's going on.

"Did she now?" he says, wrapping an arm around Amanda's shoulders. “Well, we do enjoy company.”

"She did," Allie confirms. And then she takes a deep breath, reaches down and laces her fingers together with Harry's. "Because…we’re together. Dating."

To their credit, her parents keep their cool. Amanda hides how shocked she is extremely well, because while Allie's not totally inexperienced when it comes to guys before Harry, she's never exactly brought someone around to meet her parents before. And—yeah, she and Harry have never talked about putting a label on their relationship. But she wants her parents to remember Harry as who he is to her, and...well, it might as well be true. It pretty much is true. And it's how she feels.

They take it in stride and invite Allie and Harry to sit down while dinner is cooking, turning away to lead them into the kitchen. She finally chances a glance up at Harry. He has his lower lip tucked in between his teeth, because he's hiding a grin and—dear God, this might be the first time she’s never seen Harry Bingham blush. His hand wraps around hers a little more tightly. She likes it.

Dinner isn't the strained affair she knows Harry thought it might be. Jim asks Harry what he's doing for school next year, and he tells them the plan is to go to Columbia, which her parents seem to approve of. Maybe because Allie's had her heart set on going to New York for a long time now, as well, but for their purposes, it's...irrelevant. That future, the one where Harry packs his things and goes off to college, is so far off both of their radars right now, but her parents seem pleased, so she lets them think what they want. And then Harry compliments her mom's cooking, which is always a surefire way to get on her good side.

"Allie tells me you don't let anyone else into the kitchen," he jokes, and she raises her eyebrows around a mouthful of chicken. She'd forgotten she'd let him in on that tiny detail, back at the beach house probably.

"Maybe I would if they made real food for a change," Amanda says, her eyes jovial. "Allie has such a sweet tooth, you know. Gets it from this guy over here." She jerks a thumb over at her husband.

"Guilty," Jim shrugs, not looking the least bit guilty.

"I noticed," Harry says, smiling. Allie wrinkles her nose at him, and her parents exchange a look.

They approve of him. Not that she would have done anything had they not, but it makes something warm and happy bloom in her stomach. And Harry—he looks like he likes it, too. Sitting around a table, joking with her family, eating a home cooked meal. It makes her heart ache for him, knowing that he doesn't have any of that waiting for him if and when they return from their mission.

Although, with the way her mom is foisting seconds onto Harry's plate, that might not necessarily be the case anymore.

"Your parents are, like, really nice," he says to her afterwards, both of them stuffed after Jim, with a twinkle in his eye, pulled out a tray of no-bake frozen cheesecake for dessert. They've retreated to her room with the promise to keep the door open. Not that her parents think she's the type to do anything outrageous, especially not while they're home.

"I know," Allie says, sitting down on her bed and pulling her backpack up with her so they can go over its contents one last time. It's heavy thanks to all the gold, though the stack of print-outs they have isn't negligible, either. "I told you, we can trust them. But thanks for sucking up to them anyway.”

Harry chuckles. “I wasn’t sucking up. Your mom seriously is a good cook.”

Allie considers this. “I never really thought about it until now, but my mom makes dinner every single night. On top of working full time. It must be exhausting for her, but she does it all without complaining."

"That's real," Harry says, a wistful little smile on his face. "Must be nice."

Allie presses her lips together, her heart going out to him again. "You know," she says, tilting her head to one side, "this doesn't have to be our last dinner with them. Something to look forward to, once all this is over. Right?"

It's the first time either of them have referenced the fact that this thing, whatever it is, will have an end, at some point or another. And once that end comes, the presumption is that the two of them will still be with each other. At least, that's what Allie's thinking, because she likes Harry independent of all this stuff. She'd like him whether they were in a multi-dimensional conspiracy theory or not.

"Trying to tie me down, Pressman?" Harry smirks, though she can tell that he likes the idea by the genuine look in his eye, despite the cocky grin.

"Haven't I already?" she replies, raising an eyebrow. He laughs and ruffles her hair, pushing her head slightly so her body tilts into her pillow. He observes her from above, one arm braced over her body, then goes to stroke the side of her face with one hand gently, the look on his face so affectionate and fond that it makes her chest hurt.

"Yeah," he says, softly. "You have."

She buries her face into the pillow after that so she can hide her blush.

When she recovers, they lay out all of their resources on Allie's bed. The school's void contract with the coach service, the new agreement with the fake bus company. Cassandra's selfie, with another copy that's a zoomed-in version of Pfeiffer's face. The letter demanding $1.5 million along with the refusal, signed by the mayor. Screenshots of Karen Bingham's text message conversation mentioning Pfeiffer. All of Harry's gold. A typed out log of observations and phenomena that the two of them have collected from their dreams, including how electricity works but communication doesn't, the solar eclipse, the cut-off roads. A manifest of every person who's missing, with their names added to the very bottom of the list.

"It has to be enough," Harry says firmly, standing back from the bed, which strongly resembles a conspiracy theorist's white board at this point. All they're missing is the red string and the push pins. "I mean, look at all this."

Allie has to agree. Seeing it all laid out like this, in one place, the dots connecting and telling a story that hits all the questions of who, what, where, when and why—it's powerful. They sweep all of it back up, putting the files back in order in a cohesive packet tucked away inside a manila folder, stolen from Karen's office, that they weigh down with the stack of gold bars in the center of Allie's bed. "They'll come looking," she says as she puts the final bar on top to re-form the pyramid, "when they remember. When they realize we're all gone."

"Do you think—" Harry says, but then he hesitates. "I don't wanna jinx it," he says uneasily.

"No, what is it?"

"Do you think—well, since we started losing our memories after leaving town...do you think, once we get there, we'll start losing memories of here?"

It's a valid question, one that Allie hadn't considered at all. She thinks for a moment, and says, "I don't think so. Cassandra talked a lot about wanting to come home, in my dreams. And in the church, they were talking about missing their parents and everything. Seems like they remember everything about the real world."

"Yeah," Harry says, looking relieved. "Yeah, you're right, I'm just being paranoid."

"No, it's good that you're considering all possibilities," she assures him. Then she gets an idea. "Here," she says, reaching around her neck to unclasp the star necklace that she always wears, the matching one she'd had with Cassandra since they were little, until Cassandra couldn't wear hers anymore because of all the surgeries she had to get. She sets it on top of the gold, its delicate chain pooling around the star, blending in against the smooth surface of the bars. "So my parents can have something of me, too, and so whenever I see that I'm not wearing it, I can remember that it's here."

Harry pokes at it a little, moving the star with his forefinger against the solid gold. Then, he removes the signet ring from his pinky finger and places it in the middle of the star. That had belonged to his father, too, she knows. "There," he says. "Now that goes for both of us."

It's also a nice reminder, Allie thinks, that they did all this together. And the whole town will probably know it, soon, once everything comes to light and people start getting their memories back.

Satisfied that their pile of resources and reminders is visible, Allie and Harry slip out of her room and head back downstairs. Her parents are in the living room, bickering good-naturedly about what they want to watch tonight, even though Allie knows they don't end up watching anything unless she joins them, talking to each other late into the night instead. She doesn't want to go in and see them, too scared of the one-sided goodbye that she knows they won't understand until later.

It's easier to slip back out the front door with Harry, into the night. This isn't goodbye, anyway; she'll come back. They'll all come back. 

  


**

  
"You still haven't told me exactly how we're supposed to get over there," Harry says.

"You'll see," Allie replies. Allie's house is closer to the edge of town, over by the bridge overlooking the gully that borders the inland side of West Ham, where they've almost arrived.

They've been walking for about twenty minutes now, the night air getting cooler around them as the hour grows late. This distance out, the darkness swathed all around them as houses and buildings gradually disappear until it's just trees and road, the air feels like it's hanging heavy with an omen. She's scared, of course she is, but also strangely calm about it all. Harry is too—maybe because this is what feels right, this is the direction in which they've been pushed all this time.

The truth is that she doesn't even know how to begin explaining her theory to Harry, or her experience with the dog, and then seeing their past selves the other day. It's something that he'll just have to see for himself. She hopes she's right about this, though, because if not, they'll have to spend another Wednesday here in West Ham and figure out a method of reality-hopping that actually works. But all of her gut feelings have pretty much been correct so far, and Allie doesn't think that's exactly a coincidence.

At this point, none of it feels like pure serendipity. Her getting sick that Monday morning, Harry waking up late, all their theories proving correct...she doesn't know if it's fate, or something else larger at work. Some kind of force sent in to right the course of reality and using her and Harry as the conduits to effect change.

And if she and Harry were meant to get together through all of that, then...she supposes there's not much to be argued. But she likes the idea of having chosen him herself, of exercising some type of free will when it comes to matters of the heart. She'll stick with that, for now.

Harry recognizes the main road that leads them out of West Ham once they cross the intersection that will lead them, in about five minutes of walking, to the bridge, and on the other side, the thicket of trees that feeds into an on ramp for the highway.

"We're walking out of town? Won't we forget?" he asks, jogging to catch up when she crosses the intersection while he stalls at the storm drain.

"We're not leaving town," she answers. "We're waiting."

Before he can ask her what they’re waiting for, there's a jostle in the thicket on the other side of the bridge, the leaves and underbrush rustling even though there's no breeze in the air. Harry grabs ahold of her arm, startled, but she shakes him off. "It's okay," she says when she sees that his shoulders have tensed up, outlined in the silhouette of the street lamps lining the length of the bridge. "Harry, it's fine."

"How can you be so sure?"

But then, right on cue, the black and white border collie comes bobbing out of the underbrush, shaking the dried leaves and twigs off itself before trotting leisurely towards Allie and Harry. All of Harry's breath whooshes out of him at once, relieved, and he puts his hands on his knees momentarily.

"I fucking forgot about the dog," he says, half-laughing. It comes to a stop in front of Harry before sitting back on its haunches, patiently looking up at the two of them. "How did you know?"

"Call it a gut feeling," Allie shrugs. "Also, I knew he was gonna be around here at this time. Because this is where we saw him last time, and we're still in that same day. Remember?"

Harry reaches down to give the collie a scratch under the chin, which it accepts with great enjoyment, its tail thumping against the asphalt. Allie smiles; the night, suddenly, doesn't feel so foreboding anymore.

She says, "This guy's gonna take us where we need to go. Right?"

The collie wags its tail harder, nosing in the air like almost like it's nodding.

"Wow," Harry says. "I don't even know what to say to that."

They have no choice but to follow once it rises from its sitting position and begins walking across the bridge, towards the direction it came from. Harry gives her a look that expresses exactly what she's thinking: what the hell, why not follow a mysterious dog into the darkness and possibly to an alternate reality? Allie has a pretty high bar tolerance for weird after the past few days they've spent. She'll accept pretty much anything at this point.

Allie doesn't know what she's expecting when they cross over to the other side, because it's not like they'd instantly lost their memories when they left town the first time. And technically they're still within town borders, still on the right side of the posted, graffitied sign. She's about to make a comment on it when, suddenly, the dog's ears perk up and it looks off into the distance, towards the road that's too dark to see down without the help of the street lights that end at the opposite mouth of the bridge.

"Someone's coming," Harry whispers and—she can hear it too. The sound of tires rounding a curve, the hum of a car engine.

"It's _us_ ," she tells him. Who else could it be?

"What the fuck," Harry breathes. The dog turns its head towards them and whines, and Allie tugs on Harry's arm, urging him into the thicket of branches and leaves on the side of the road.

"Come on," she insists. "Come on, we can't be seen."

"This is so fucking trippy," he says, but he follows along with her, both of them pressing against an old tree trunk, hidden in the darkness. The collie, like she knew it would, darts out in front of the car—Harry's car—as soon as it makes its appearance. 

Allie has to slap a hand over her own mouth to stop from exclaiming when the car screeches to a halt, just barely not hitting the dog. Next to her, Harry instinctively puts a hand up to her shoulder, gripping tight. Jesus, had they really been that close to it? The headlights flood the road and the dog as it stands stock still in front of the vehicle, but visibility's still not good enough to see inside the car, where she knows past-Harry and past-Allie are freaking out at the sight of the collie.

And then it just...stands there. Staring straight ahead, its tail swishing in the overly bright floodlights. Allie tries to recall, had it been there for that long, the first time? What is it doing?

"It's...waiting for us," she says aloud, as quietly as she can, when the realization dawns on her. "Come on, we have to go." She tugs on Harry's sleeve, beckoning him to follow her, making her way down a few feet through the branches, parallel to the car, so they can circle behind it while past-Allie and past-Harry are distracted at the sight of the dog.

"I don't get it," Harry mutters when she forces his head down, both of them scurrying back behind the car and over to the other side of the road as inconspicuously as they can. As soon as they reach the other side and are reliably hidden enough in the trees, the collie comes running to join them, into the dry underbrush where past-Allie can no longer see, even with the rolled down window.

"Me neither," Allie confesses. The dog comes up to nose at her hand, asking to be pet. She bends down and rubs behind its ears, deep in thought. The car engine hums for a few more moments, the vehicle stationary, before it starts rolling along again, back into town. "I think it must have to do with the timing. It's almost midnight." That must be when the change has to take place. When they'll be able to make the crossover. It lines up, given that they're trying to break the day's loop. "Okay," she says down to the dog as she straightens up. "Lead the way, I guess."

It wags its tail again and stands, begins leading them further into the trees and then down the sloping path that cuts into the gully, under the bridge. It stays a couple yards ahead at all times, looking back over its shoulder every so often to make sure they're still following. The way is steep and rocky and, more than once, Harry steadies her by the elbow as they make their ungainly way further and further down, until they can hear the sound of running water from the gully's creek, normally inaudible from up on the bridge. It's a stark contrast to their usual manicured surroundings; down here, everything is wild and overgrown, left to its own natural devices, until things are artificially flattened out to make for the railroad that the daily commuter train to the city passes through on its way to the next station.

"Am I crazy for like, genuinely believing this is going to work?" Harry says as they finally get to the underside of the bridge. He's speaking at a normal volume, but down here it's loud, the only sound for miles around save for the running water and the occasional night time cricket. The moon, somehow, seems brighter from down here, the stars more plentiful, casting Harry in a glow that, when put in relief next to the shadows of the night, make him look about as attractive as ever. She thinks, not for the first time, how glad she is that he's the one who's gone through all of this with her.

"If you are, then I definitely am too," she says, fondly, taking his hand as they cross the width of the gully under the bridge.

He runs his thumb across her wrist bone, leaning his shoulder into hers. "You think things would be different if we got on those buses after all? Like, between us." He sounds careful about the hypothetical, and a little bit wistful, like even thinking about the possibility upsets him.

"Maybe, yeah," she muses. They're really taking their time making the cross; the collie waits for them patiently across the way, ready to make the climb back up to the other side of the bridge. They're making one big circle. "But...I think we would have found our way together eventually. You know?"

Because this, the two of them: it feels meant to be. That's the part she doesn't say out loud, but he seems to get it, because he holds her hand tighter, makes a noise like he's pleased. Allie thinks that as long as she got to know him, she'd choose Harry in any reality, over and over again.

The climb back up to the other side is steep and difficult. Allie's out of breath and sweating lightly about halfway up, but that's alleviated when she registers that it's no longer so quiet all around. The sky, at some point, has opened up and started to rain, the noise of it rustling through the trees and dripping onto the top of her head. They're shielded from the worst of it by the canopy of leaves overhead, but then it starts to really come down, thick and fast and soaking through her shoulders. That tugging sensation in her stomach, the same one she'd felt last night as she fell asleep in her own room, is back as well. She doesn’t have to check her phone to know it must be past midnight.

Allie looks over at Harry, pushing her slick hair out of her eyes. He's already got his eyes on her, a look of wonder written onto his face. It's not supposed to rain in their world, on the day that they lived over and over again. 

They've actually done it.

When the two of them reach the opposite slope that takes them into the trees by the entrance of the bridge, soaked to the bone, the dog is waiting for them at the top, blinking rain out of its eyes and panting slightly. Once it seems satisfied that the two of them have proper footing on the pavement, it swishes its tail and turns, scampering back down to the underside of the bridge, disappearing into the darkness. It's okay; Allie has a feeling this isn't the last time they're going to cross paths.

"Holy shit," Harry says to her, taking a few steps forward, right into the middle of the road, around the same spot the dog had stood earlier in front of the car. Only this time, there's no car. In fact, there's no more road. Directly in front of Harry's feet, the pavement ends, crumbling into dirt and rocks that grow into a dark wilderness that, even through the rain and the darkness, Allie knows stretches on and on. "We actually did it. We're actually here."

Allie goes to join him, turns his chin around with a single finger, away from the trees and towards what's important, what really matters. On the other side, the bridge still exists, as do the street lamps, as does the road into town, as does the town itself and all of its intrepid teenage inhabitants.

The two of them stand in the middle of the road, rain coming down all around them, looking over the town that both is and isn't theirs. Allie takes a deep breath.

"You ready?" Harry asks.

Allie nods and says, "Let's go save everyone." 

  


**

  


_"Sometimes I wonder if there’s another version of this world where we’re friends._

_Where we want the same thing for people. Work together. Look out for each other."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes there may or may not be an unintentional time paradox but we are ignoring that because i am finally free of this thing
> 
> thank you SO much to everyone who has commented or let me know that they've enjoyed this story. i love you all 3000. ♡♡♡
> 
> [tumblr](https://dystopians.tumblr.com/) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/harrybinghams)

**Author's Note:**

> no idea where i'm going with this, but join me, won't you?
> 
> [tumblr](https://dystopians.tumblr.com/)


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